Business Continuity Virtual Portal

DJS
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Scenario

The corona-virus pandemic has led to a shutdown of many industrial activities that will soon need to get back to normal. However, many things have changed that will affect them, from changes in consumer habits or customer needs, to the need for new capabilities in the products they previously produced. In addition, new business models will be needed to ensure commercial success in a post pandemic world.

The Problem

As we emerge from the pandemic, many companies will require specialised support to develop the necessary contingencies to adapt to the new reality. Product development, manufacturing and supply chains may have been reduced or even disappeared, forcing significant changes in the operation. Today, this is mostly done via physical interaction of internal or external experts with the commercial and technical processes in their facilities. These direct people and process interactions allow to plan for data acquisition and subsequent analysis that enable them to sustain reliability, quality, safety, and general troubleshooting in the existing or modified operations. However, the new reality is that in many manufacturing sites, work disturbances were deep, damaging operational systems, productivity, staff competence, confidence, product quality and increase stress and tension to maintain business at acceptable financial condition. A traditional solution is problem analysis, definition of continuity or solution plan and implementation. In many cases, external experts travel is required for person-to-person interaction. Currently this is limited in people’s ability to respond to the challenge. Companies, specially SMEs, will find themselves with low budget, under time constrain, not even knowing, in some cases, where to find the new support that they will require. This is well recognised problem: EU is sponsoring several initiatives as part of Horizon 2020 program: Industry 4.0 for SMEs with University of Bolzano, and Smart Anything Everywhere together with Industry Platform, EpoSS. Research communities (such as Researchgate) are engaged too (see references).

Solution

Companies will need to develop Business Continuity plans that allow them to resume operation and eventually continue driving new products and services to market.

We propose to develop a centralised Euro-wide platform network where companies can identify the services of experts and remote solutions that can meet their new needs without the necessity of traditional face to face interaction. This starts with advice to identify and verify those critical areas that have been disrupted during the crisis and how to run some validation tests of potential solutions and continuing with connections to experts available in the required areas.

The new solutions will have to provide the necessary technical support to maintain operations (product development, manufacturing, supply etc.) and the ability to collaborate during limited physical presence situations. It is also expected that many of these new solutions will lead to more efficient and cost-effective operation and may be continued even if we return to a less strict regulation of movement and interaction. To make a simple analogy, we propose an Airbnb™ equivalent for business continuity except that the portal provider organisation will be a non-profit operation only at the service of its customers/clients. Also, as a key point of differentiation to other online “expert websites”, the portal provider will itself have qualified consultants that will be able to guide the clients towards their best suitable consultant(s). People use platforms such as Airbnb because they-

provides easy searching and access to many validated services
gives them confidence in the services they buy
provides built in protection like insurance and payment systems
it’s a one stop portal enabling the purchase of multiple services in just one place

The Business Continuity Virtual Portal (BCVP) will provide the same valuable benefits to SME’s buying these services compared to trying to find and negotiate terms, confidentiality etc. with multiple individual consultants who may not even have expense but critical provision such as Professional Indemnity Insurance.

This solution will not just be of value during this crisis but will also have cost and environmental advantages vs. the current approaches, making it a long term valuable proposition.

Impact Potential

It is estimated there are approximately 25.1 million small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the European Union (2018 data), with the vast majority of these enterprises micro-sized firms which only employ fewer than nine people. The DJS team members know from our personal experience of working with SME’s as suppliers, that they rarely have the time or expertise to consider business continuity planning. In addition, it is recognised that SME’s have deficiencies in ongoing R&D activities which is another facet of our proposal to supplement SME’s R&D by providing focused consultant support. A recent EU report on SME’s (Annual Report on European SME’s 2018/2019) revealed that SME’s contribute 56% of value and 67% of employment across the EU. Therefore, if SME productivity drops post Covid-19, this will have a major impact on the European economy. Providing practical and targeted guidance to SME’s is likely the only way to prevent significant losses in productivity, particularly for Micro and Small SME’s.

Easy to scale

The BCVP is very easy to scale from a technical standpoint. BCVP can be run as a company by expanding the current prototype (DJS) with all operations being web/cloud based. The final service delivery is also virtual with remote collaboration tools for people interaction and a unique low-cost solution for remote connectivity to manufacturing and/or lab operations for data sharing.

From a networking standpoint, the value that BCVP will offer being non-profit and claiming proven technical experience will attract best-in-class freelance entrepreneurs and consultants (individual or companies) to participate in this high-quality platform. Growth will happen over time as reputation develops.

Technical complexity/novelty

The BCVP is based essentially on existing technical systems capability. The novelty is provided in how this capability is leveraged to solve the problem of providing validated and focused expert remote support to SME’s for business continuity and technical consulting.

Prototype demo/existing option?

The concept of BCVP is now in operation as DJS Process Consulting Ltd. A small team of expert consultants, with typically 20+ years experience in major multinationals, are providing the proposed services to a number of clients. This can be expanded in breadth and depth to create the proposed BCVP to support European SME’s.

Prototype completion (how it works/ development)

At DJS we have developed and implemented a remote support solution tailored to SME’s consisting of two elements:

The Intelligent Manufacturing Platform (I.M.P). - a single platform designed to unify all your industrial data monitoring (live & historic) and data analysis needs, on site and remotely:
Practical Expertise - A unique team of highly experienced consultants with vast industrial experience of product development and manufacturing. The average experience of our consultants is 25+ years of industrial based work in their field including scale up of new products to pilot plant and plant scale, sound start-up and quality monitoring procedures and troubleshooting, project development and management, business continuity planning, disinfection products development and manufacturing, compliance (e.g. Health and Safety) program management. This is a completely unique combination of providing tailored Industry 4.0 hardware & programming coupled with the access to very pragmatic expertise to provide a fully outsourced solution. In a covid-19 type situation the two elements are in perfect harmony to enable DJS to partner remotely with SME’s in these areas. This represents a proven demonstration that this approach is successful and is the basis of our conviction that it will expand as described above.

Business plan

Vision The vision is to create a virtual Euro hub of validated deep experts in Business Continuity planning and associated technical aspects (R&D, Manufacturing etc.). In execution this will be similar to AirBnB except that it will not just offer choices but advice and guidance to potential clients. A company will be formed (likely expansion of DJS Process Consulting Ltd.) to manage the hub, recruit and validate consultants/experts, match SME requests to consultants and manage all associated business admin (payments, insurance, confidentiality etc.)

Business overview

How will we achieve the vision ? We propose an extension and refinement on the current demonstrated business model of DJS Process Consulting Ltd.

What product are we selling? - Business continuity and Technical Consultancy

Target market - SME’s

How will product offerings address the needs of customers? We will build upon the current consultant expertise in DJS Process Consulting Ltd. with a strict and rigorous assessment of new consultants to ensure that they have the necessary depth of proven experience in their field. Our product is not a top level generic management consultancy, via virtual tools, our consultants act as virtual team members to fully partner with the customers to address their needs.

Product Delivery – All consultants will be associated legally to the BCVP provider. The BCVP provider will form the legal contract with the client and set up confidentiality and payment terms. Therefore, the client can easily access multiple expertise with just one simple contractual relationship. This has multiple benefits since many companies (even SME’s) are not set up to work with individuals. Purchasing procedures require relationships with established and proven companies.

Pricing Pricing levels will be offered at market rates for consultants commensurate with area and depth of expertise. The consultant will be paid a percentage of the fee to enable the BCVP provider to cover admin costs and retain funds for further development and enhancement of the product offering. The BCVP provider will operate on a not for profit basis. Pricing levels are expected to be competitive as we will leverage on the capacity of our model to reduce travel expenditures.

Advertising & Promotion The current demonstrated advertising strategy for DJS Process Consulting Ltd. is via web channels and most business is derived from networking and personal recommendations. We are offering high value expertise (average consultant experience 20+ yrs). If this proposal is a winner, we would like the EU to promote and endorse our initiatives to help SME’s thrive in these difficult covid times. In return DJS Process Consulting would echo EC initiatives and help SMEs to participate to EC programs and EC objectives.

What will be required Development of dedicated web/Portal with inclusion of security, storage, interface connections to existing intelligent tools, currently designed and operated by DJS. Implementation of GDPR, Insurance procedures. Creation of supporting marketing digital material and networking communication strategy.

Relevance post-Covid BCVP does not simply mitigate the problems caused by Covid-19 crisis, but it allows modernisation of European industry, increase of agility, quality, productivity and open opportunities for innovation and sustainable solutions.

Project Recommendation Summary

It is for all the above that we recommend to lead the formation of a task force that will create the Business Continuity Virtual Portal (BCVP) that can support SME’s remotely in a wide variety of areas so that the European industry can get back to their feet fast and in to better status that what it was before, giving Europe an edge in productivity and innovation.