Everybody knows the expression: “fool me once, blame on you but fool me twice, blame on me”. And this is absolutely true for the current COVID-19 virus. Despite the SARS-outbreak at the beginning of this century, nobody was prepared for this global pandemic crisis. And everybody understands that the current threat demands drastic measures, even when it impacts the global economy tremendously.
But this will only be accepted once. Governments will not launch emergency relief funds, banks will not extend the credit-lines and customers will not accept that businesses go in lock-down, … next time COVID-19 comes around.
Dealroom.co[1] forecasts that this Corona-crisis will have a structural impact on remote assistance, tele-health and in general all forms of remote work. Companies that were prepared for remote assistance clearly have a head-start, so don’t miss the boat.
Smart glasses support business continuity
At Iristick, we support industrial customers to implement their business continuity plans and prepare their Covid-19 recovery plans. Smart glasses are ideal solutions for handsfree workers (e.g. field technicians and maintenance engineers) that need support from suppliers or subject matter experts. Read the story of global food processing equipment giant John Bean Technology (JBT) to see how they supported customers at the peak of COVID-19 with the start-up of a new production line.
Their customer in Italy had purchased a tomato-filling machine and this needed to be set up before the season started. Due to the imposed travel restrictions, the JBT expert technicians were not able to travel to Italy to install the machine. Instead, they sent a pair of smart glasses to the local Italian technicians. By enabling remote assistance, the expert operators, based in Belgium, could provide instant guidance and detailed instructions through the smart glasses to the local Italian technicians, who were eventually able to set up the machines themselves.
In this crisis period, we see that companies have to deal with hard travel-restrictions for a longer period making it impossible for technical staff to go on-site. “Business Continuity Management & Critical staff” is identified and obliged to go into home-quarantine to avoid long unavailability due to COVID-contamination and related recovery. We compiled the best practices to keep operations running during crisis times here.
Remote assistance is here to stay
While many businesses are able to mobilize rapidly and setup crisis-management teams in the short term, companies have to think beyond the coronavirus. What will be the ‘next normal’? Resilience will become a key challenge and all the lessons learned by the Covid-19 crisis teams will be incorporated into standard business policies. Companies will have learned that “not every meeting could have been an email”, but we will also have learned that a lot of meetings, support interventions, on-site visits … are perfectly feasible via remote assistance.
That’s why the Iristick sales team is happy to share their expertise in remote assistance with companies who do not want to be fooled twice by the next outbreak of COVID.
[1] https://blog.dealroom.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Corona-vFINAL.pdf