Industry Standards Change Those Standards Keep Ramping Up and Will Again

Every bit states relax stay-at-abode restrictions, nosotros're inbound a post-COVID-19 "new normal." Whether you're still operating or are completely restarting, this is your guide to workplace readiness, new rubber protocols, business continuity, and more.

The touch on of COVID-19 on U.S. businesses has been dramatic. Whether you've continued to operate or are planning to restart, you'll need to take several actions to ensure your operations are as prophylactic and productive as possible.

Our COVID-19 crisis management squad has been providing expertise and resources to help you assess the business impact of the crisis, respond to immediate health and financial consequences, and prepare to restart operations when that day comes. Each phase of our approach is focused on your current state of crisis:

Phase 1 — Answer:  The deportment taken during the early days of the crisis were critical to set up the stage for survival and recovery. What you lot did — be information technology positive or negative — with your people, customers, and suppliers volition exist remembered forever.

Phase 2 — Restart: Even if y'all're currently operating, having solid plans to restart or reengineer your business concern begins with thinking ahead of the current state of crisis. Organizations will need to restructure how they operate their businesses in the new normal of social distancing. Companies that can hit the ground running will exist far ahead of those who look.

Phase iii — Be ready:  Nosotros've all learned a peachy lesson from this crisis: We weren't set. Focusing on preparation for the adjacent disruption should now be woven into your day-to-24-hour interval operations so information technology becomes office of the fabric of your business.

Our five-pace restart guide will assistance you evaluate your current state of affairs, triage the disquisitional actions required, and prepare an immediate activity plan. Here are the areas to initiate and focus on immediately:

i. People: New safety protocols and workforce optimization

Clearly, the wellness and well-being of your people are the highest priority equally you restart or ramp up your operation. Yous'll demand to review and implement new human resource policies, processes, procedures, and infrastructure in rapid response to changing circumstances and regulations.

Whether y'all're restarting or ramping upwards your facility, start past because the flow of people. This includes implementing new processes for entering and leaving the facility and for keeping people and workspaces clean throughout the 24-hour interval. Whenever and wherever people congregate, place ways to modify the flow to attach to social distancing guidelines. Common areas and activities include entry and exit, fourth dimension entry, meetings, and tiffin breaks, all of which need to be reengineered. You may demand to establish new shift schedules, work arrangements, or work zones that keep people separated. And all staff will need education and training on the procedures in order to keep themselves and their coworkers safety.

Infrastructure changes are also required to support employee safe, facility maintenance, and the new ways piece of work will be conducted. Facility changes include boosted hand-wash stations, storage for new protective equipment, and clear piece of work zone marking and signage, among others.

To safely operate in a COVID-xix environment, it will exist critical to make your operating model compliant with new practices and requirements.

If your business has continued to operate, you'll need to place gaps in your existing processes, procedures, and infrastructure to determine the appropriate steps to accost the potential vulnerabilities. To safely operate in a COVID-19 environment, information technology will be critical to make your operating model compliant with new practices and requirements.

Note that a variety of new roles and responsibilities will emerge in this new normal. Roles will need to exist defined — and modified as needed over time — to ensure your workforce adheres to the new processes and to carry out escalation procedures in cases where they don't.

Critical actions:

• Decide the policy, process, and process changes needed to provide your people a safer and healthy environment when complying with new requirements.
• Analyze how people flow through your facility to identify take a chance areas and reengineer the flow to minimize take chances.
• Prefer necessary employee and company screening at entry to prevent exposure (using criteria such equally high temperature, sore throat, other symptoms).
• Change work schedules and work areas to eliminate density of people within the facility.
• Identify and install the necessary infrastructure changes to support new policies, processes, procedures, and regulations.

2. Daily operating procedures: Maintain daily operating process efficiencies

The new condom protocols volition take profound impacts on your people in their daily work processes. In the brusque term, productivity will be reduced equally workers' positions in offices, production lines, facilities, and other areas are separated, cleaning breaks are added, and personal interactions become limited. Accordingly, the style that you schedule your people must be evaluated. For example, in a manufacturing plant, it may take longer to prepare a line equally packaging materials may need to be sanitized before existence positioned at the stop of the line. And in the function, workstations for people will need to be either spread out to allow social distancing or hours rescheduled to reflect fewer people in the immune workspace. Supporting processes such as maintenance and cleaning volition likewise need to alter, since there volition exist a requirement for increased sanitation of surfaces.

We won't be able to get back to the one-time fashion of doing things for a while (if ever). Maintaining levels of collaboration and procedure efficiencies will require tight coordination with your human being resource, supply chain, and engineering science teams. Equally you evaluate process changes, your human resources squad tin assist make up one's mind the impact on the health and safety protocols that are being introduced. Your supply chain team can help ensure that you have the correct level of bachelor PPE, products, and raw materials to support your operational plans. Finally, your technology squad can help enable your new business processes, equally they have already in a remote working world. Reconfiguring your office, service, distribution, and manufacturing systems will likely need to happen, and introducing engineering science-based communication tools with needed security will be a priority.

Critical deportment:

• Understand the new safety protocols required, in detail those that impact the piece of work required in offices and at production plants.
• Assess the full scope of business processes to determine productivity impacts.
• Make up one's mind process changes required in guild to maintain safety and productivity.
• Ascertain new procedures needed and provide communications which marshal with the needed safe protocols, including potential impacts to work efficiencies.
• Understand potential supply requirements, encompassing bachelor PPE, and probable supply chain disruptions that could impact production plans.

3. Training, education, and monitoring: Changes are only effective if they're well-communicated and adopted consistently

In one case you've established new processes, roles, and responsibilities, you'll need to turn your attending to grooming and education equally well as management and enforcement practices. New practices and processes are but effective if they're communicated well and followed.

Training plans should comprehensively encompass all wellness and condom processes and exist formally documented. It will exist important that you track that training has been delivered, who'south received information technology, and the level of comprehension and date.

Advice plans should target non just your internal squad, merely your customers and suppliers likewise. Your customers and suppliers will need to know how your new processes impact them, even if it's just balls that flow of production will remain unchanged. Frankly, most of them will be requesting your plans as part of their processes.

New practices and processes are just effective if they're communicated well and followed.

You'll need to ensure yous take staff in place with responsibleness for continually monitoring the COVID-19 situation and agreement new guidance as issued. Reviewing and implementing human resource policies in response to irresolute circumstances and regulations — quickly — will be essential to communicating with your people and keeping them rubber.

Now that you lot've optimized the menstruation of your people and your operations, you'll need to plough your focus to active monitoring, measurement, reporting, and continuous review and comeback. Even as you lot do your best to set up upward the proper processes, policies and procedures, and infrastructure, be prepared to make changes. How fast you lot respond to new circumstances and changing regulatory requirements volition make the difference between maintaining an ongoing operation and being forced to shut downwards. Additionally, as you innovate new technology and automation, procedure and staffing changes likely will need to follow. It's important to understand the timing of technology changes yous're planning and implementing. And y'all'll need to update operating playbooks and revise training plans.

Critical actions:

• Develop and deliver education, advice, and grooming materials to all staff and document your efforts.
• Ensure necessary management and enforcement roles take been established and staffed and that these roles and responsibilities are clearly communicated.
• Monitor and measure all activities to ensure their effectiveness and compliance with health and safety procedures and regulations.
• Apply your results to identify changes that need to exist fabricated, and then adjust processes and procedures accordingly.
• Report results beyond the organization to ensure transparency, gain purchase-in, and allay employee concerns.
• Fold in boosted piece of work processes as operations expand and as you keep to optimize boosted processes.

four. Workplace readiness: An enhanced operating model

The COVID-19 pandemic will require longer-term changes to your operating model to continue the workplace safe, your people healthy, and to optimize your futurity organization productivity. Focus on your core processes and make up one's mind where digitization, automation, and data analytics can be used to promote social distancing, eliminate manually intensive processes, and meliorate productivity. For example, automating points of contact with surfaces, such as material-handling activities, volition reduce hand-to-surface and manus-to-hand contact. Engineering volition play a key part hither. Consider the use of automated entries, tablets, and handheld devices that can be sanitized, and optimize your ERP and business systems to digitize more of your operations and reduce the corporeality of newspaper handled. Keep in mind that most of these initiatives take months rather than days or even weeks. It'south important to focus on the core piece of work being performed rather than incremental, fringe improvements. Additionally, information technology's important to develop an optimization roadmap early and so it can guide ongoing decision-making as circumstances change with time.

Critical activities:

• Identify target comeback areas inside your functioning that crave high levels of physical contact, frequent handoffs between workers, manual data manipulation, or a high concentration of people in a given area.
• Scope out optimization initiatives to strategically leverage automation, digitization, and data analytics. Where can yous streamline operations, optimize your concern systems, and make optimal utilise of your role or product space?
• Assess the costs and benefits of each optimization initiative to prioritize which projects to pursue and how many resources should be assigned.
• Plan the implementation activities and milestones by establishing executive commitment, determining timing, and assigning resource.

five. Business concern continuity planning: Manage your future risk

Our COVID-nineteen "new normal" surround will add run a risk to your operations. Client demands will modify, the supply chain may exist disrupted once more, or yous could experience an outbreak in your facility, heightening the risk to your workforce. These dynamics require you to think through all possible scenarios, develop contingency plans, and have emergency processes mapped and ready to deploy.

How fast y'all respond to new circumstances and changing regulatory requirements will brand the difference between maintaining an ongoing operation and beingness forced to shut downward.

Call up through each area of your operation and perform a formal risk assessment. For instance, if i of your production facilities has to close for a period of time, tin can you shift key activities to an alternative location? Is at that place a contingency plan to reorganize work? Or keep safety stock at higher levels? Defining all of the activities necessary to brand this shift should exist function of your operational continuity plan. The same kind of analysis should be washed for all parts of your organization and supply concatenation.

Finally, management leadership must make sure that they have continuity plans in place in every area of the concern. For case, the finance section should have a programme in identify in case of potential cash and liquidity crunches, and one for the Information technology section to manage engineering disruptions.

Disquisitional actions:

• Develop a future vision for your operations based on customer needs, your core competencies, and the new demands due to the COVID-19 crisis.
• Consider all critical concern functions and develop and execute contingency plans for operational disruptions.
• Work with leadership across the concern to validate and amend plans.
• Develop defined time periods for revisiting and updating plans.
• Pay particular attention to plans in these areas:
  • Decide the risk of operational disruptions (locations, operations, financial risks) and assess the impacts of your supply base on your operations.
  • Communicate your plans for disruptions or shortages to all customers (focus particularly on core customers to back up long-term relationships).
  • Evaluate alternative supplier arrangements, particularly to come across short-term needs.
  • Identify, address, and program for cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
  • Prepare your cash forecast and conservation programme.

Questions? We can assistance

Planning ahead is immensely more valuable to mitigating risk than reacting to a crunch. We're hither to help. If yous have questions or need immediate assistance, contact us to talk to an expert and receive complimentary guidance on key questions.

thibaultancion.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.plantemoran.com/explore-our-thinking/insight/2020/04/covid19-your-guide-to-ramping-up-or-restarting-operations

Share this post