Shockproofing your business: Identifying the risks and focusing resources
It goes without saying that the past few months have been particularly difficult for many businesses. No one could have predicted the events that led up to a nation in lockdown, with many companies left with no choice but to halt or reduce operations in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
For many, business survival lay in quick decision making and, where possible, putting robust measures in place to protect their firm from financial damage.
Building a path to recovery
For those businesses who could, remote working served as a saving grace, allowing teams to quickly adapt to the extreme change. However, for financial professionals, the real challenge lies in how they can add more value to their organisation, leverage remote working and drive real progress at a time when they’re facing even tougher pressures to keep business finances in check and support staff and directors.
Essentially, it’s about learning from these unprecedented times and putting together strategic plans that set the business on a path to recovery quickly, while ensuring they are better placed should situations like this ever occur again. After all, no one knows exactly what the future holds but putting in place robust preparations for the unexpected will mean better decisions about personnel, services and supply chain.
The power of digital transformation
For finance teams, the key to any successful crisis strategy will lie in harnessing the power of digital transformation. Helping to identify risks, it’s invaluable for equipping teams with the tools they need to analyse crucial financial data to better inform decisions, while also helping to drive efficiencies and productivity levels.
Talk of digital transformation in the financial management world is certainly nothing new. Indeed, technology has been transforming the way we work and live for many years. Yet, many finance teams are still yet to use it to its full potential.
Tools such as a financial management system are invaluable for any finance team weathering the storm of an unforeseen crisis, while giving them clear indications of where cost savings can be made and how to maximise resources. In short, it all boils down to having a good shock-proofing strategy in place - one that allows teams to be resilient and agile enough to overcome such widespread disruption when sales may be lower, and revenues reduced.
While all finance professionals will be familiar with the importance of trying to predict and safeguard against upcoming difficulties as well as the challenges of anticipating opportunities along the way, no one can predict every eventuality or potentially damaging scenario.
However, financial management tools are increasingly helping to improve business resilience, helping them stay afloat when the unimaginable becomes a reality.
The introduction of the Government’s recent furlough scheme was a measure set up to help many businesses through these difficult times, allowing them to furlough staff, protect jobs and, in turn, safeguard the business.
In the past, this would have been an even more difficult task. After all, how do you decide who should carry on working and who should be furloughed?
Now, thanks to the rise of financial management systems, finance teams are able to access invaluable data such as timesheets and employee information to help decide where the business needs resources most and suggest where cost savings can be made by furloughing staff.
Though never an easy decision to make, financial management tools mean finance teams are making fair and well-informed decisions backed up by real-time and accurate data. If not, they run the risk of wasting invaluable resources at a time when so many businesses are cash-strapped or leaving the business with a weak and unstable infrastructure without enough staff to adequately carry out the job at hand.
It’s certainly a tricky balance to get right.
These are some desperately difficult times for so many businesses across the UK and beyond and no one knows what’s around the corner for the business world over the coming months or indeed years. However, it’s important to ask, ‘did you have the right tools and strategies in place to shockproof your business this time round?’ If not, then now’s the time to start putting those essential plans in place.
With the pressure still well and truly on for businesses to remain agile and resilient, and the current Covid-19 measures set to stay for the foreseeable, it’ll be those businesses that take the time to learn from the current crisis and put in place robust shock-proofing strategies backed up by data that will come out of this fighting.
