The COVID-19 outbreak has left the world reeling, and the global economy has been suffering worse and worse damage over the last couple of months. Almost every single business in the world has been affected, and desperately searching for solutions to recover. Even the essential services industry has suffered due to lower demand. The combined effects of human health and welfare, disruption of the supply chain and massive changes in consumer behaviour and buying power has left companies in need of rapid adaptation and change to survive in the present circumstances.

Many Companies across the globe has done mass lay-offs, put the employee on mandatory unpaid leaves and have reduced the salaries of remaining employees.

Governments are coming up with Covid revival package for MSEs and industries.

For businesses around the world, the first and foremost form of possible relief has come from the use of technology, especially digital technology, to adapt to these changes. From online payment services, digital communication platforms to virtual business processing, management and Cloud ERP Software, digital technology, the internet and telecommunications have been able to prevent a complete worldwide shutdown of all businesses.

To survive this pandemic and consequent economic downturn, businesses around the world, especially small businesses and startups, need to implement certain changes in their operations. For the Indian economy, the MSME sector will largely lead and decide the recovery from the possible upcoming recessions, and hence they must -

Digitalize and Automate

The Indian MSME sector is witness to an existing problem of companies, especially small and micro-enterprises, delaying or refusing the implementation of digital technology for their business processes. This can no longer persist as any organizations who do not embrace digital whole heartedly have little to no chance of survival in this current ecosystem. Tech-savvy companies have already demonstrated the ability to overcome COVID-19 restrictions through the implementation of cloud services, mobile apps, AI-ML software and social media, to counter the prevention of human contact due to social distancing and quarantine rules. Small businesses must learn from these examples and begin transferring all possible processes from manual setups to digital cloud-based platforms like Cloud ERP, Cloud Project Management Software, Inventory Management software, Procurement to pay software and many more.The Cloud Business Software will also help maintaining social distancing.

Get Ready for Work-From-Home

New strategies and processes need to be formulated and implemented immediately to facilitate a work-from-home setup. Companies worldwide have already begun to face the need to adapt to maintaining an almost entirely remote workforce, and this will continue well into the future. To gain the edge over competition, a proactive stance must be assumed by founders, CEOs and top management towards work-from-home including the deployment of company-wide awareness and training in efficiency and productivity protocols. Ensuring productivity while work from home is important to companies as well as employees.

To facilitate a rapid shift to remote working models, companies must ensure ?

1. Negotiate with infrastructure vendor to support remote workforce demands: All the technological requirements for remote work must be available to your employees, including hardware, software and telecommunication devices. Companies should pre-negotiate high volume network and internet facilities with providers, and implement efficient collaboration technologies including video-conferencing tools, file-sharing and cloud ERP software to ensure that poor bandwidth, connectivity and lack of cloud ERP doesn?t hamper the employee productivity.
2. Optimized infrastructure costs and management: As more employees will start working from home, companies need to re-evaluate their infrastructure maintain on-premise, and balance that with new potential costs to provide infrastructure to employees at their homes, such as laptops, advanced internet connections, security software and reimbursements for telephone and internet expenses.High level on-premise infrastructure such as servers, desktops, office-wide bandwidth, seating facilities, etc. will become useless, and all related assets should be repurposed.

Shift Everything to Cloud

Companies who had implemented cloud-computing technologies in their business process before the COVID-19 crisis hit, have already seen how much it has helped them get through the lockdown conditions. Other companies must take the hint and migrate their operations to cloud, in preparation for the times to come. There will be an increased demand for work-from-home, and that will naturally put a lot of stress on the IT infrastructure. The main advantages of using cloud technology to meet this demand are the inbuilt security and automatic scalability of cloud structures.

As the economy reopens, companies will be bound to bow down to situation and inculcate work from home culture.SMEs will not have any tech bandwidth or the budget to get required infrastructure on -premises. The only option SMEs and Start-ups will have is to look for affordable SaaS software. There will be many options in the market and choosing the right one that fits into your business requirement and is affordable will be important.

Companies who aren?t used to handling a big IT load need not hire new IT staff and procure infrastructure just to shift their operations to digital, they can leave that to dedicated cloud service providers. Cloud ERPs for example, will become a necessity in coming times. Cloud ERP can allow your business processes to transform to a digital platform, without any effort on your part. Simple subscriptions to customized plans allow you to integrate the ERP into your system.

Reduce Human Dependence

It must be obvious with the earlier given points and the current conditions that businesses cannot depend as heavily as before on human agency and interactions. With the new social distancing rules, businesses must use automation and technology to reduce human dependence drastically, and transfer as much of the processing tasks as possible, to machines and software. The easiest way to do this is again by implementing cloud ERP that can automate all menial and repetitive tasks, leaving only critical decision making to human employees. With reduced workforces and the need to cut back on expenses, such process automation will become essential to small and medium businesses.

Conclusion

Though there is no amount of preparation that can guarantee a business?s success in the trying times to come, it is quite safe to assume that only those companies that adapt with the times and make the best use of technology will have any hope for growth and survival. As the COVID-19 curve is flattened, technologically equipped companies will be able to get back into business without any extra hassle.

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