Focus on Business

Sue Mucha

The big lesson from this unpredictable year is infrastructure planning pays.

“Hindsight is 20:20” refers to a vision measurement, not this crazy year. But from a planning standpoint, the year “2020” has rewarded electronics manufacturing services (EMS) companies that built resilience into their operational plans. As I write this, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to spur an era of new normal. The introduction of vaccines will hopefully drive a return to something close to the old normal. While this challenge is ongoing, however, it is important to look at some of the operational investments that have proved most beneficial.
Here are five areas that stand out to me:

IT. Companies that were already supporting employees working remotely as a result of business travel, remote home offices or a need to work in multiple time zones more comfortably had an edge in converting a larger portion of the workforce to work-at-home scenarios. VPNs, internal systems capable of supporting secure and fast access to remote users, videoconferencing tools, seamless transfer of work phones to mobile phones, and existing policies/training on maintaining security in home office environments are all key elements enabling employees to effectively work at home. Companies with these in place simply had to scale up to accommodate a larger user base. Systems strategy has also been integral in managing the supply chain and forecasting disruption driven by Covid-19. Companies with systems that can quickly assess inventory levels, material availability and production status globally were better off than those with facility-specific systems or systems that required much manual interpretation to gather that information.

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Read more: Hindsight is ‘2020’: The Organizational Stress Test

Sue Mucha

Ramp the advertising programs and support them with content tied to sales efforts.

In my last column, I discussed the communications strategies that were most important as Covid-19 began to change our working lives. This month, I look at communications strategies that will be most important as we resume the new normal working world.

As I write this (Apr. 16), the strategy for reopening businesses is just being formulated. From everything I’ve seen reported, it appears the strategy will be a rolling relaxation of restrictions, which means geographic advantages for companies in places that either had minimal infection rates or have successfully flattened their curves. Rolling increases of restrictions are also likely if a region starts to see new spikes in infections.

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Sue Mucha

Or how not to make a (potential) problem bigger than it is.

As I write this (Feb. 28), the spread of Covid-19 within the US is still very limited in terms of numbers of confirmed cases. That said, it is already creating a large body of communications lessons to be learned that will remain relevant a month from now.

The stock market has tanked, and people are fearful of what’s next because there is a lot of speculation on worst-case scenarios. Cases are growing worldwide, and the media is uttering the words “will have an impact on the supply chain” every other sentence.

The basic problem with this or any other evolving crisis (be it pandemic, material allocation or natural disaster) is, at the beginning, it can be difficult to assess what will happen. Will this be an H1N1-type event, where business continues with heightened attention to employee health in impacted areas, or will it require the draconian quarantine measures already seen in China that created significant supply-chain disruption? The answers may be unclear for weeks. The natural impulse is to say as little as possible. The problem is when only the media is talking, people imagine worst-case scenarios. Hence the huge selloffs in the stock market.

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Joseph Fama

How the NPI sector can position itself to beat Tier 1 EMSs at their own game.

Read more: EMS Collaboration: The Giant Killer

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