| | July 20209BCP helps companies prepare for such eventualities, protect personnel & assets, and ensure normalcy of function in as little time as possiblewere able to serve 20,000 retailers across 13 cities, 75 towns and 320 villages in India.Oddly, we started gearing-up for the COVID-19 crisis without really knowing the enormity. In early February, when most of the companies in India were not serious about COVID-19, we put together a BCP strategy to ensure the safety of its people as well as operations continuity. The leadership team started giving training & face masks to each employee, along with hand sanitizer which was also not available to anyone due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis in China and all the stocks of masks and hand sanitizers were being exported to China. We were the first to ensure that we had sufficient stock of N95 masks which can be provided to the employees. There was a time when companies were holding the stock of masks and hand sanitizers to make more money; Ascent Health was one of the very few companies which gave preference to its employees.All the WHO guidelines were followed from day-1, where the staff was mandated to wear masks & gloves, apply hand sanitizers, wash hands regularly, and check their body temperature every three hours. We also ensured that we maintain social distance at all times. Cleansing through disinfectant is regularly done in all the warehouses.It isn't that we did not face any challenges as we went about our work. We had our own set, to be frank:· Will we have any business interruptions?· How will all the users work remotely?· Will our infrastructure be able to handle the additional load on the network?· What kind of support will be required from partners?Digital First StrategyWe quickly worked around these challenges and ensured zero disruption to our business. All this was only possible with their Digital-First approach, where every business process is digital and ensures that there are no manual dependencies in most of these processes. RPA was used to generate POs across India. The order-taking is also online. RPA as technology has proved its worth in such situations where we did not require any human intervention and to ensure a steady flow of orders and processing. One of the challenges we faced was the payment collection via cash/cheque which we quickly decided to stop and only accept digital payments to avoid any further spread of coronavirus by way of handling the cash/cheque transactions.Ascent Health has digitally transformed itself. We can take the orders online from the retailers and hospitals, process the orders and also ensure the delivery. This would have never been possible without a robust SDWAN network which provided us with high availability and resiliency of network resources with low latency for our critical applications to work. VPN helped our employees to work remotely without any disruption. Our partners (vendors) were quick enough to assist us in such challenging environments, though few also tried to take advantage of this opportunity.The success of Ascent Health team could be gauged from the fact that with a total of 2500 employees across India serving 13 cities and 320+ villages, not a single day was lost due to lockdown. We are among one of the very few distributors across India who have ensured the availability of medicines even in such lock-down situations.For all this, the credit goes to all the warriors, the employees who didn't hesitate to come to work despite facing a lot of challenges due to lockdown, and the strategic team which ensured the entire Business Continuity planning is done well. Our employees are well taken care of, and the founders who six years ago thought they could change the pharmaceutical supply chain landscape and have now proven that it was possible.It was a Déjà vu movement yesterday, when our Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasized on the importance of Supply Chain in India and that all the businesses have to gear-up to ensure constant supply of goods. Chandresh Dedhi
< Page 8 | Page 10 >