Gaurav Bansal, director of Kiran Consultants, writes about the new work culture the industry is adopting during Covid-19. Kiran Consultants is into enterprise solutions since 1988 catering to the printing and packaging industries pan India.
As world over, people are struggling to keep up with their daily routine amid the Covid crisis, new ways have come up to cope with daily work tasks like online meetings which have really taken a surge.
People are using online platforms to conduct tasks like machinery Functional Testing (FCT) before it gets shipped to the buyer, online diagnostics of machine via remote access or intelligent Google Glass which lets the machinery service engineer figure out the problem with the machine while he is sitting at his place. Internet of Things (IOT), automation 4.0 have become even more important and will be adopted even more in future.
Packaging material manufacturing companies, being in the essential commodity domain, has been allowed by the government to operate but with limited workforce. Having limited supply of material, workforce, transport problems, cash crunch, it becomes imperative to smooth out the business operations even more in these times by adopting latest technologies like enterprise software, marketing tools like CRM.
The essential commodity buying has hiked with panic buying and stockpiling by consumer. Packaging manufacturing companies are under stress to fulfill this surge in demand with limited resources at their disposal. In these testing times, every resource matters and ought to be used to its maximum potential.
It is predicted by health experts that such pandemics could be an every year occurrence making it imperative for organizations to build a standard operating procedure (SOP) to deal with such trying times in future so that work doesn’t get affected.
Managing the supply chain is a major task during such time. Having access to material inventory data from anywhere could be of great help to plan out the production schedule. With limited resources, minimum cash flows, managing wastages and downtime becomes all the more important to ensure greater productivity.
Work from home can be made more effective by adopting enterprise solutions whereby the workforce can continue taking decisions by making all relevant data available to them in a timely manner. As the saying goes, “Data is the new gold,” marketing activities can continue uninterrupted from home or elsewhere. Accounting, tax return filing, financial planning can happen uninterrupted from home as well.
Technologies which we foresee being adopted more in future would be digital marketing, IOT, business intelligence based on data collected from machines to reflect true job wastages, wastage patterns, machine breakage/downtime analysis. All this sea of data captured at the grassroot level will only result in making us lean and mean which is very much required in these times.
