Disaster Recovery

Because information technology is now integrated in most businesses, a business continuity plan (BCP) cannot be complete without a corresponding disaster recovery plan (DRP). While a BCP encompasses everything needed – personnel, facilities, communications, processes and IT infrastructure – for a continuous delivery of products and services, a DRP is more focused on the IT aspects of the plan.

If you’re still not sure how big an impact loss of data can have, it’s time you pondered on the survival statistics of companies that incurred data losses after getting hit by a major disaster: 46% never recovered and 51% eventually folded after only two years.

Realising how damaging data loss can be to their entire business, most large enterprises allocate no less than 2% of their IT budget to disaster recovery planning. Those with more sensitive data apportion twice more than that.

A sound disaster recovery plan is hinged on the principles of business continuity. As such, our DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) blueprints are aimed at getting your IT system up and running in no time. Here’s what we can do for you:

Since the number one turn-off against BCPs and DRPs are their price tags, we’ll make a thorough and realistic assessment of possible risks to determine what specific methods need to be applied to your organisation and make sure you don’t spend more than you should.
Provide an option for virtualisation to enjoy substantial savings on disaster recovery costs.
Provide various backup options and suggest schedules and practices most suitable for your daily transactions.
Offer data replication to help you achieve business continuity with the shortest allowable downtime.
Refer to your overall BCP to determine your organisation’s critical functions, services, and products as well as their respective priority rankings to know what corresponding IT processes need to be in place first.
Implement IT Security to your system to reduce the risks associated with malware and hackers.
Introduce best practices to make future disaster recovery efforts as seamless as possible.

We can also assist you with the following:

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Without Desktop Virtualisation, you can’t attain True Business Continuity

Even if you’ve invested on virtualisation, off-site backup, redundancy, data replication, and other related technologies, I?m willing to bet your BC/DR program still lacks an important ingredient. I bet you’ve forgotten about your end users and their desktops.

Picture this. A major disaster strikes your city and brings your entire main site down. No problem. You’ve got all your data backed up on another site. You just need to connect to it and voila! you’ll be back up and running in no time.

Really?

Do you have PCs ready for your employees to use? Do those machines already have the necessary applications for working on your data? If you still have to install them, then that’s going to take a lot of precious time. When your users get a hold of those machines, will they be facing exactly the same interface that they’ve been used to?

If not, more time will be wasted as they try to familiarise themselves. By the time you’re able to declare ?business as usual?, you’ll have lost customer confidence (or even customers themselves), missed business opportunities, and dropped potential earnings.

That’s not going to happen with desktop virtualisation.

The beauty of?virtualisation

Virtualisation in general is a vital component in modern Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery strategies. For instance, by creating multiple copies of virtualised disks and implementing disk redundancy, your operations can continue even if a disk breaks down. Better yet, if you put copies on separate physical servers, then you can likewise continue even if a physical server breaks down.

You can take an even greater step by placing copies of those disks on an entirely separate geographical location so that if a disaster brings your entire main site down, you can still gain access to your data from the other site.

Because you’re essentially just dealing with files and not physical hardware, virtualisation makes the implementation of redundancy less costly, less tedious, greener, and more effective.

But virtualisation, when used for BC/DR, is mostly focused on the server side. As we’ve pointed out earlier in the article, server side BC/DR efforts are not enough. A significant share of business operations are also dependent on the client side.

Desktop virtualisation (DV) is very similar to server virtualisation. It comes with nearly the same kind of benefits too. That means, a virtualised desktop can be copied just like ordinary files. If you have a copy of a desktop, then you can easily use that if the active copy is destroyed.

In fact, if the PC on which the desktop is running becomes incapacitated, you can simply move to another machine, stream or install a copy of the virtualised desktop there, and get back into the action right away. If all your PCs are incapacitated after a disaster, rapid provisioning of your desktops will keep customers and stakeholders from waiting.

In addition to that, DV will enable your user interface to look like the one you had on your previous PC. This particular feature is actually very important to end users. You see, users normally have their own way of organising things on their desktops. The moment you put them in front of a desktop not their own, even if it has the same OS and the same set of applications, they?ll feel disoriented and won’t be able to perform optimally.

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Advanced Business Management

Our consultants are highly trained to provide complex management solutions and strategy planning for your business. You can count on us to improve performance and your business skills, while cutting costs.

We ensure full support in a broad range of business management areas, such as:

Business Strategy

Knowing how and when to make the right strategic move is critical to your success in today?s dynamic environment. Our Strategic Management Consultants provide solutions for a tighter integration of your vision, values, and mission statements with the strategic management process.

The result is a stronger alignment of your operating activities with your goals, and also an improved internal infrastructure to support and manage the strategic management process.

Business Process Improvements

In our years of activity, we have developed a robust process to ensure Business Process Improvements projects are implemented successfully. To achieve a positive outcome a number of factors must exist and we?ll make sure your company manages to get the right mix of: sponsorship management and commitment, process improvement goals, right motivations, cultural issues management, provision of adequate resources and funding, and availability of standards and procedures.

Performance Management

An effective performance management system integrates all aspects of the organisation from a shared vision, through a common language, and establishes a culture of accountability and results. It provides more of a holistic way of managing your organization that is more powerful than its individual parts, and without forsaking the values of the organisation.

Change Management Services

Economic downturns, fast rising new competitors, and even climate change, can force companies to scale down, engage in mergers & acquisitions, or transfer to a new location. We?ll help you through every step of the change process, from: evaluating the required change by conducting diagnostics such as change complexity, causal, structural, and context analysis, managing stakeholders including your sponsors, top executives, managers, and personnel, planning for the change, and managing the change process itself.

Project Management

Whether you need help for a single project or much more, we’ve got you covered. With us you get a coordinated, presence-of-mind approach to project management that will point all of your projects to an overall strategic direction, no matter how complex or simple these might be. Our services incorporate all project-related activities including: programme management, project risk management, project review and audit, project rescue, and project governance.

Interim Management

Our resources have an MBA and/or professional accounting qualifications with an average of 10 ? 30 years of progressive work experience with public companies, in complex private equity environments, and/or privately-held middle market companies. We not only offer the most highly qualified project / interim resources to our clients, but we also allow for an interim-to-hire provision in our contracts.

It has proved mutually beneficial to our consultants and clients to have the option for longer term employment opportunities after having worked together on a project / interim basis.

Field service and customer transparency

These days, a business is as good as it is transparent. Businesses are on unsteady ground because of the ever changing face of social media and a never-seen-before demand for information. With many sources of info on the internet, being credible is a sure way of building trust and loyalty among clients.

Here is an example. Customers will always believe what they see. If they see the work you put into furnishing their favourite products, you have a greater chance of getting their approval. They can invest more in what they see. The clothing merchandise Patagonia did this for their Footprint Chronicles line to show how their jackets are made and worked out fine for them.
Transparency is a must. Nowadays, customers never forget when they feel cheated. It is even harder to ensure transparency because many clients are also experts who scrutinise every detail. So, how can you keep transparency at the forefront?

Have transparent workforce management

Customers always look for new information and want to be in the know. There is nothing worse than not being able find a product manual or an easy way to set up appointments. By giving your clients a self-service option, they can pick the services they want. This leaves more time to get stuff done rather than answering unending service calls from dissatisfied customers.

For instance, you could have a field service customer self-service application that allows customers to look for personalised services, a machine manual, book appointments, or solve any other problem. Customers then get feedback anytime. This one-on-one approach can help customers feel like their questions are being answered. They?ll also not go through the hassle of long hold times to reach an available customer service representative.

Create transparency in field service repair projects

If field technicians have access to field service software, it allows technicians to be more open to customers. This gives them vital information like customer history and the ERP, so that they can explain changes that were made after past enquiries and what is being done in current products. Such information can be a guide for future updates or let the techs suggest products that suit a client’s taste. Unlike always staying offline and out of touch with your client, using field service software can allow entry of allowances and mileage, and also let the customer know the delivery time for their products.

Show customers what they’re paying for

With field service automation, billing will also be transparent. By using the available information about your field service solution, the station can send updated service reports to the customer like mileage, allowances, parts, hours worked, and photos of broken parts from the service. After the customer authenticates the transaction with a signature, the field service agent can generate and sent to the customer an invoice based on the agreed upon services. In case allowances and mileage can be forwarded to the customer, it will be shown on the invoice.
Because you use field service automation, it means that the customer will receive the invoice really fast ? in days rather than weeks ? and transparency will skyrocket because the whole experience of the service will leave a permanent mark in their mind.

Mistaking information for transparency

Being honest with your customer is the one thing. Wasting their time with unnecessary information is another. Here is an experience I had with a small retailer. Tracking information is only useful if it has recent updates and is accurate. If the company want to use real time tracking, let them do so under one condition ? updates should be regular and on time so as not to leave the customer frustrated because they also make plans based on the same information. Late updates shed light on the nature of the service command. Everyone hates cooked-up real time information.

A company must not always have a one to one exchange of information with customers to maintain transparency..

Use simple language that all customers can understand
Don’t use abbreviations that only employees know
Never ever air your failures and flaws to your customers

It is interesting that most of the tools we use to keep in touch with our clients and servicing their requests can also be used to gather data and iron out possible errors to improve products and services. This is a good chance for service providers to evaluate and make necessary amendments.

There are some areas that will need improving while others will not, nevertheless, the client needs to always be informed and know why things are the way they are. Not all details should be told, so filter what you share.

5 ways field service supports customer service

Sales organisations are always in motion, working to deliver the right product to their customers. To keep customers smiling all times is hard and only needs close communication and fulfilling promises that were made to them. This is where the field service delivery team comes in. Field service can either meet this demand or fall short plummeting satisfaction rates.
This is a task that relies on right people using various parts and information to get the job done. No matter what, the customer always expects to get exceptional services whether it be over the phone, chats, in the field, online messaging, over email, or social media.

These five field service points are suitable for any business model and guarantee excellent company-client relations.

Proactive service

A proactive service gives more to the customer. More attention is given to the customer so that the right actions, deliveries and repairs are done. By getting everything right the first time, the customer has less to do ensuring that they are satisfied with the services.
However, the field service technician is flooded with a myriad of unpredictable situations; overheating equipment, stalled machines, and insufficient precaution. But through field management software, they get more data about the customer and type of service or parts expected and they easily ride through any storm and prevent future damage.

Transparency

Nothing frustrates a customer more than a schedule that delays repairs. They easily ditch you for better services elsewhere. By offering the customer a service where they book appointments based on their own availability, we can easily sync this to the technicians and manager?s calendar. This not only saves time but also money from otherwise idle equipment.

On-site and off-site collaboration

Having seamless communication between field and office technicians is vital. Field technicians need to know more about parts, repairs, client maintenance history, and predict what should be changed in the long run. The faster they do this the better.

There should be a system that creates and automates communication between field and office technicians. Let each have the upper hand when providing parts, products or services to the customer.

Flexibility

Information is key to field service agents. They make the first impression since they make the initial contact with clients. Regardless of the resources, the field technician must always be armed with mobile tools they will need to access online resources and be ready for any emergency.

Actionable performance improvements

Customers demand excellent service a company could offer. But as the game constantly shifts, the service management technicians must also come up with plans to stay up to par with competition. All these stems from coming up with KPIs, measuring them and turning them into a workable plan for the future.