Kiwi businesses and COVID-19: business continuity solutions

When any unexpected emergency happens, how will your business stay operational?

The Government is working hard to support local businesses. While there are a lot of great consultants available that are worth their price (worth their weight in gold when you see some of the stats below), check out the free resources first to make sure you’re clued up and ready for BCP action: business.govt

To be successful, companies need to keep an up-to-date IT infrastructure. In today’s competitive environment, even businesses with less than 15 employees can hire IT consultants...that specialize in providing enterprise-level support to small companies.

 (disaster planning) - More on this at the end of this article

Quick stats: 

• “An hour of downtime costs $8,000 for a small company, $74,000 for a medium company, and $700,000 for a large enterprise.” (Datto)
• “40-90% of small businesses never reopen following major disruption” according to bks partners
• 160,000 estimated small businesses (1-19 employees) in New Zealand, which contribute a total of 153 billion to industry sales (NZBusiness). 

By far the biggest impact is on smaller businesses that rely on local traffic to keep the lights on. This creates a painful slack in the supply chain for small-to-medium businesses, which many struggle to ever recover:

How can businesses survive this and future disruption?

You need a Business Continuity Plan (BCP). Whether you chose to formalize a process or keep it more informal, you need a strategy around how your business and staff will survive disruption. Formalise your plan as much as possible, as it will help you cover all your bases. Your plan should be:

• Discussed with your leaders 
• Available to the entire team (whether in or out of the office)
• Complete enough that a new member of staff can understand 

It is vital to consider what you will need to manage disruption in the short (1-3 days), medium (<14 days) and long term (14+ days). Until we find that tree that really does grow money, it is unlikely that a modest business could survive for 90+ days without support or major sacrifices to operations.

Some of the critical questions to ask yourself and discuss with your leadership team are:

• Can we access everything we need from home? (information, systems, digital tools/software)
• Can we communicate effectively from home as a business? (what communication channels are or aren’t available?)
• Can my business Survive 2 weeks of unplanned loss in productivity?

Really think about EVERY element of Business Continuity 

What you’ll need to action your business continuity plan

The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) has been advocating for stronger and more secure workforces for a while now. In a recent article COVID-19 and the importance of the Digital Workplace they explore the value of business continuity that is supported by intelligent systems.

Cloud based systems are popular for a reason, and being able to take your entire office with you on your phone or laptop means you and your business can maintain operations from anywhere.

According to Small biz genius and Owl Labs, 16% of companies are fully distributed. The key point here is that you can and should be able to maintain operations with a fully distributed workforce. This adds a layer of protection against disasters and disruption. In addition, there are a number of stats that support remote work options for staff, especially in younger more digitally native workers.

Engin was founded to support kiwi companies that need modern and effective digital solutions. As a cloud based ERP solution platform, we developed our platform to be adaptable for small to medium sized kiwi businesses, and to help you thrive. If you need help digitizing and protecting you protect your business feel free to reach out for a free consultation at info@engin.systems.


The engin team wish you and your loved ones a safe and healthy 2020.

Nga mihi
Team Engin