The covid-19 pandemic has brought in an array of changes, ranging from slowed economic growth and changing demand/supply to drastic shifts in business operations and working environment. The latter two changes are pivotal matters to be noted w.r.t ensuring smooth functioning of SME’s and Start-ups.
Work culture might change permanently with WFH or Virtual office becoming more widespread. This would lead firms to look into functional areas of delivery like Accounts, Finance and HR (in essence, most of the non- Manufacturing/Supply Chain/R&D functions), which may not need office environment to work from or even shared work spaces.
SMEs in particular need to prepare as revenue will be under stress for at least next two years or so, and need to take adequate steps to deal with this scenario. Some examples of steps that should be considered:
Per seat cost savings should be leveraged, with the Core team focusing more on new ways of Marketing Strategies
The Fixed Cost burden should be shifted to Variable Cost Model for non-core functions at least.
Use of Cloud based solutions and data backup facilities on Cloud that have evolved over time with data security protocols and become highly cost efficient. There are proven applications like QuickBooks, SAP Business One and Oracle E-Business Suite are available on Cloud. For Start-ups and SMEs QuickBooks is more apt.
