Business Continuity : You need an innovation strategy : PK Thimmayya
By Retail4Growth Team | April 28, 2020
In these testing Covid-19 times, businesses and individuals are going the extra mile to decimate the impact of the pandemic. In doing so, one critical problem companies are facing is managing business continuity. As organisations look to turn current challenges into a competitive advantage, business continuity plans are being tested and reworked every day given.
In an exclusive interview with Retail4Growth, PK Thimmayya, CEO- Flemingo Travel Retail Ltd iscusses ways to ensure business continuity amid COVID-19, future preparations and more
1 What does business continuity mean to you?
- ability to bounce back from this unprecedented crisis and return to normalcy
- It is basically to understand the situation at hand, analyse and understand the new normal business environment, and adapting to it to create a favourable business turn around.
2. Has the current situation forced you to take a harder look at biz continuity? Does it help you prepare better you for the future?
Yes, the situation being unique and worldwide will force some unique & innovative changes to be done at the business end. We are using the downtime to plan ahead, being agile and flexible at the same time to accommodate the ever-changing situations.
3. Sustainability and continuity are closely linked. Going forward do you think there is going to be a greater focus on sustainability in this industry? What are your own plans in this regard?
- Yes and we had already started moving towards sustainability. One of the big focus for us this year was to look at environment-friendly and sustainable backend procedures
- This was evident when we shifted to paper bags and furthermore offer cotton shopping bags to customers
- Procedure to reduce packaging waste and various other measures were already being put in place and we will continue to move in this direction.
- Plus, we are planning to move towards e-invoice and storing of records on the cloud to further reduce paperwork.
4. End of the day business is about people. How do you ensure that the concept of biz continuity seeps into the working culture and staff mindset?
- staff today are much more aware about the changing environment and are equally concern about the wellbeing of the company as about themselves. It is all inter linked and today’s generation is very responsive to external factors affecting the business. Gone are the days when employees were detached from Management’s vision for the Business
- We work in a very flat organizational structure and this creates larger accountability and workload being shared by them. We have already had management calls with about 50 of our managers across the board to discuss the issues at hand and consult on possible direction to take for business continuity, since we believe in a very consultative & collaborative approach.
