Vijay Krishnan

I work for a mid-sized Lighting Solutions firm based in Mumbai with over 200 employees in multiple locations in India and abroad. The Global outbreak of coronavirus has been somehow propitious in forcing us to rethink the several elements of our business to make it more robust to such calamities. The response to such a very unforeseen calamity is surely testing our organizational prowess and making us learn and evolve our strategies with each passing day. The decision taken in mid-February to cancel all international meetings and visit by Senior Management and Sales team with the backdrop of COVID-19 tending to become a global pandemic was very wise. Business visits which were scheduled to Japan and Germany were cancelled. We did not wait for Government notifications but kept a watch on the Global COVID-19 trends to arrive at this decision. https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus As a Business Leader the topmost priority in the present situation in India is the safety of our people and to ensure that they’re not exposed to and do not contract COVID-19. We’re primarily based in Maharashtra and with the largest no of COVID-19 confirmed cases in India (64/327 as on 21.03.20; 20%; http://covidout.in/ ) our employees here are at a high risk of getting infected via community transmission in the next phase of the epidemic as has been evident in the spread of the virus in Italy, Iran and Spain. Prevention is always better than cure. Conflicting priority is to ensure continuity of businesss and manage the completion of our pending orders for the month and attain a decent sales revenue for the year ending, which due to multiple challenges of the last quarter has already been much lower than expected. With India’s GDP expectations for 2020-21 being better than this year we would like to harness each and every opportunity the next year presents us to improve our performance manifold by investing in becoming lean and efficient. Business establishments in Mumbai Metropolitan Area where we’ve have our offices and factories has already been shutdown since Saturday, 21st March 2020 till 31st March 2020 and perhaps likely to continue thereafter seeing the upward trend of the number of confirmed cases. Now, as we’re looking at the next 10 days or more to be bound mostly to our homes to ensure social distancing the challenge is to keep the employees informed, engaged and motivated. The following are few of the actions we’ve implemented or are immediately considering: 1. Risk Management Process is often overlooked and not given prime importance in the company. We’ll use this opportunity to get the management team to seriously discuss and document the risks and prioritise the actions to mitigate them. Disaster Management Plans will have to be fully activated with enabling more people to effectively conduct their work from home. 2. Part of the manufacturing risk is managed by having factories in different locations and that decision taken earlier has paid off. Ramping up operations in the new facility is to be taken up immediately. 3. Dependence on China for some of our key parts created a parts shortage earlier this month, we will need to invest on make/source these parts in India. 4. Sales Review 2019-20 and Business planning 2020-21 will be managed via video conferences in early April instead of meetings. We might make it the norm henceforth to reduce travel expenditure 5. Travel process automation and engaging a professional company to manage our travel bookings (www.quest2travel.com ) was being considered early this year. We will fast track these projects to make travel more effective and cut-down travel costs. 6. We’re evaluating a Learning Management System for implementation in April-20 to drive policy dissemination and training to better integrate all our employees located all India and abroad. Focus here will be on training Sales and Field Service Teams on new products, Lighting controls and Installation procedures. 7. For Production team training has always been a casualty due to pressure for production and delivery at the factories. We will use the next ten days to conduct some key training online and improve the skills of our employees. Focus will be on Problem Solving Techniques and Six Sigma DMAIC. 8. As a growing company many of our policies and procedures still have some loose ends. Process Owners will be given a target to re-evaluate each process and ensure the adequate interlinks. 9. We transitioned to SAP but are still not using all the functionalities in the right way or still some elements of the processes is managed by email. This break will be used to create validations and workflows so that more elements of the process is brought within the ambit of SAP. This will enable many more employees to really be effective while working from home. 10. Last but not the least, we will need to focus on contributing our efforts as a responsible corporate citizen in areas such as product refurbishment, waste management, increasing forest cover and other programmes of regional and national importance to increase our Good Business Karma which we believe is as essential as sound business planning and execution. These are only some of the immediate responses. It would be necessary to create teams and outline responsibilities and clear timelines with constant monitoring from the leaders for us to achieve the above. More actions will be discussed and considered in the coming days. Reference Links: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/covid19-coronavirus-countries-infection-trajectory/ http://covidout.in/ https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/gdp-growth-seen-at-6-6-5-per-cent-for-2020-21-economic-survey/articleshow/73794803.cms?from=mdr