8Manage: How to operate your business remotely?

The coronavirus, or COVID-19, has dominated the media in the past few months and it has far-reaching implications when it comes to workplace responsibilities. With the spread of the virus so hard to contain, it’s important that all business owners and managers to ensure the safety of their employees and consider how to effectively utilize them under the situation where physical contact between individuals should be approaching zero. For example, sending staff to client’s offices or supplier factories becomes unrealistic under the restrictions put in place.

Most traditional ways for the business operations won’t work.  The options that remain open rely on “remote” operations which only require the transmission of data through network.  For well-prepared companies, remote working is not too much of a hindrance. All employees have remote devices and can work from home and maintain constant contact with each other via an enterprise full automation platform such as 8Manage Full Automation. All the documents its employees need for the implementation of their work are available to them on its e-DMS and can be shared as necessary.

 Its CRM, PPM and e-Procurement are remotely accessible as well. For CRM, your clients can request and receive and your business and operations departments can generate quotations, sales orders, delivery notices and provide services at anywhere at anytime. For the PPM, 8Manage allows the project manager to view the selective elements (activities, resources, deliverables, dependencies, cost items and change items) of the project on one screen in real-time. For e-Procurement, 8Manage supports comprehensive supplier management, procurement planning, purchase requisition, purchase order, simple procurement contract, master-sub procurement contract, deliverable inspection and acceptance, received, goods inventory and goods return and credit note management based on the latest technology.

 Data transmitted between its computers are being utilized at home and its servers are encrypted prior to transmission. But for less well-prepared companies, some problems can be predicted. If your company is not utilizing a full automation platform, it may have to rely on traditional telephone, email, WhatsApp or WeChat. But that’s not enough, sometimes your project work and businesses can’t be recorded in real-time, and you never know what the latest status of  your teams deliverables and accomplishments through communication tools.

For client-facing, project-facing and supplier-facing staff, the impact on operations because of the inability of these employees to physically meet their clients, project team members or vendors needs to be mitigated. If your company already has robust enterprise full automation platform, such as 8Manage Full Automation, you can invite your clients, project team members or suppliers to business-straight-thru, project-straight-thru or procurement-straight-thru with you as “external users”.
 
This current situation should be a wake-up call to your company that the Full Automation type of platforms is becoming increasingly important. It is not only critical in crisis situations such as the coronavirus pandemic; digital business-straight-thru, project-straight-thru and procurement-straight-thru increasingly being considered as a replacement to the face-to-face manual operations. For those companies that are well-prepared with Full Automation, the coronavirus pandemic has actually provided them with great competitive advantage over their competitors who don’t have Full Automation.

For those companies which find themselves having too many things that need to be face-to-face discussed and manual operated, maybe it is time to make the required investment on Full Automation. Get started with 8Manage now!