Collaborate during Covid-19

In times of crises, we are all in the same boat to survive and thrive. You may need to collaborate with parties you normally would not collaborate with as well as exchange critical information all over the world. The interesting thing is, that in today’s very connected world, there is a huge potential to quickly find contractors and partners to collaborate with.

Introduction

COVID-19 as well as measures from national governments and individual companies will impact your business and the business of your clients, vendors, partners and service providers. What kind of impact and the extent thereof depends on your industry and varies per country and in time. 

Whatever the situation is for your business, it will require some serious adjustments to meet the changing demand, to secure the continuity of support to your clients and to secure the continuity of your operations.

This is one of the 3 main sections from the "Ultimate Guide for Phase 1 - Rapid Response to Mitigate the Immediate Impact of Covid"

Regarding Collaborations:

Risks to address

• Missing important opportunities and options to mitigate the impact for your clients and your own business
• Not utilising external capacity for critical functions with high demand
• Not utilising available internal capacity and securing the continuity your business
• Causing unnecessary damage to the entire industry which will slow down recovery post crises for everyone, including your own business
  

Goal

• Win-win-win, we are all in the same boat
• Build loyal relationships with clients, suppliers and partners
• Prepare for rapid recovery of the industry and your business

Main aspects

• Clients
• Contractors and partners
• Crowd sourcing
• Competitors
• Supply chain
• Authorities

Clients

By following a collaborative and supportive approach with clients, exploring the changing requirements, limitations, possibilities and mutual interests, several effects can be achieved;

• Finding better (temporary) solutions to solve issues, like for example finding a local subcontractor of the client who can perform the work, while you cannot get a field service engineer on site due to travel limitations
• Execute other work as soon as possible, earlier than original planned, to reduce the backlog when measures are being gradually relieved
• Negotiate, if needed together with your client, with local authorities for exemptions if your client is in an essential or critical sector
• Strengthen customer loyalty

Contractors and partners

By adjusting roles and activities between our business, contractors and partners, there will be more possibilities to keep the operation going. Let go of short-term commercial interests and focus on the problems that need to be solved during the crisis.

A lot is possible if we;

• Adhere to “live and let live”
• Trust each other
• Enable each other via remote support, training and information

Crowd sourcing

Extending the topic above about “Contractors and Partners”; All over the world there are many independent and capable contractors. In today’s connected world we can easily reach them all, get insights to assess their capabilities and get them productive with the right support and information.

Your existing network of experts, clients and partners can help.

By the way, this fits in one of the trends we were seeing in field service anyway, the emerging GIG-economy or crowdsourcing.

Competitors

In a crisis of this magnitude and duration, it is probably more important to keep the industry going than to win from competitors and push them out of the market. Competitors can be great to collaborate with to keep each other’s operations going and each other’s clients supported.

A worst-case scenario would be to see the industry not being able to recover rapidly from the crisis leaving all, including your business, with little revenue for too long.

Supply chain

Continuity of your operations and support to your clients heavily depends on the availability of spare parts. 2nd sourcing and boosting inventory are tactics mentioned above.

We also need to have a high level of transparency in the supply chain, in both directions, to be able to manage and mitigate the need for spare parts adequately;

• You need transparency of potential decline and improvements in availability and logistics.

• Your suppliers and logistic service providers need transparency to anticipate on the changing demand 

Authorities

In a crisis which is strongly moderated and led by healthcare and governmental authorities, it can be important to collaborate with these authorities;

• Get information on changing measures and issues as soon as possible from reliable sources
• Negotiate exemptions to support clients in essential or critical sectors

Download the full Guide for Phase 1 - Rapid Response