Survival Toolkit for Swiss SMEs & Startups

Live news


About the Guide

The main goal of this guide is to help every entrepreneur build his own survival guide and learn how to be resilient in time of crisis.

It is the resulf of a free collective work for challenge #62 during the swiss VersusVirus Hackathon.

Index

a) Resolve urgent issues to maintain operations

b) Adapt the organization

c) Re-position strategically to new market environments

d) Build resilience capability to cope with future threats

Get Informed (a1)

An entrepreneur needs good information in order to react, adapt and become resilient in a crisis.

We provide below a list of curated links to Swiss government agencies and economic bodies

Business Checkup (a2)

First check with your team :

  • Are your workers safe ?
  • Are they able to come to the office ?
  • Can they do their job from home ?
  • Assess their level of digital expertise.
  • Define a First Response Team

Check your infrastructure :

  • Verify your telecom infrastructure is working
  • Maintain office security (assess level of surveillance of infrastructure)
  • Organize/verify backup of your software and data

Check with your suppliers :

  • Secure deliveries or obtain delays for orders
  • Find alternate suppliers in case of failure to deliver

Check with your customers :

  • Listen to short term customer needs to determine minimal stock and workforce.

Check with your finances

  • Check your accounting : cash, planned payments, planned incomes
  • Contact your audit firm and your lawyer if your situation looks bad
  • Contact your bank for credit line (eg zero interest rate loan backed by gov)

Reorganize the way you work with your team (b1)

Working under crisis specific circumstances, in particular this health-related, sanitary crisis, requires a rethink of the way your team operates, may it be in offices, on a production site, or in the logistics/distribution chain.

This may involve in particular:

  1. Re-allocating the physical presence of your teams on-site, e.g. splitting teams in two shifts, or day A/day B teams in order to mitigate the risk of having all your staff getting infected and optimising the implementation of social distancing rules enacted by the authorities
  2. Reduce unnecessary operations and activities and refocus, reinforce the focus on essential activities to be maintained and performed
  3. Re-allocating or doubling roles among your staff so as to back-up every role at least once in order to cover the absence of single roles that are essential to performing the operations
  4. Looking at how employees can perform similar work in a simplified, different, lighter manner:
    Example: waiters can take over orders for home delivery.
  5. Decide who works from home and ho works on site, and under which conditions and when

Some examples: with your team, decide if you can continue to operate, and in which mode: business as usual or with reduced activity where only urgent customers requests will be treated.

New timetable for each worker, work from home or on premises. If offices must stay open, organize shifts and transportation, hygiene rules should be introduced.

Adjusting and securing your infrastructure (b2)

This is about adapting our physical and IT infrastructures to the new necessities of the current and being prepared for future crisis

1. Securing your current physical sites and venues to maintain health security and social distancing at work :

  • adjusting furnitures to protect workers (for example plastic protections for cashiers),
  • distribute thoroughly and via an efficient, consistent system security items when available: masks, gels, …
  • ensuring distance between people and limiting the number of people in a given area via a thought system, signalling, and controls

2. Implementing a redundant, secondary infrastructure for your IT via the cloud, or via a second cloud provider :

  • Ensuring physical back-up of your data, and check daily the actual performing of this back-up
  • Ensuring, reinforcing physical security of your offices and sites in these via remote surveillance capabilities

Leverage Digital Tools & Technology to maintain Business Continuity (b3)

To ensure the continuity of your business operations, our current times offer very fortunately many online solutions and opportunities to cover many aspects of your needs.

Identifying which solutions you need, installing them swiftly, and getting your people and partners trained and supported on them also via online channels can empower your business very rapidly to restart and pursue your activities.

Maintaining and facilitating continuity with your teams and sites, your customers, suppliers and business partners:

Examples: New tools to install on home computers or laptops or smartphones. Arrange daily or weekly teleconference calls/videos with teams for projects and training.

  1. Keeping in touch and meeting virtually:
    Zoom, Teams, Skype, Whatsapp Groups, etc…
  2. Working on and managing specific operations:
    ERP, CRM, Cloud versions of existing on-premise solutions used by a business:
    Electronic supply chain platforms, electronic marketplaces (to replace on-site, physical transactions)
    • Microsoft Dynamics 365
    • Sage ERP cloud,
    • SAP ERP Cloud
      • ,
    • Sugar CRM Cloud
    • Salesforce.com
    • Anaplan.com (Connected, electronic planning)
    • etc…

    Electronic selling and distribution/supply chain platforms:
    Amazon, Local market and electronic platforms, Industry specific electronic platforms,
  3. Sharing and working on projects, ideas:
    Collaborative tools to manage projects, ideas, more in-depth types of team and transverse work:
    Google Drive and Google Docs, Slack, Teams, Miro, Jira, Atlassian, Aha, etc..
  4. Online Trainings on any topic or technology:
    Training and education platforms like Coursera.org or Youtube in general can tremendously help you to be trained and discover information, tips and advices on any necessary topic or solution or technology related to the current crisis. It can also be an opportunity for your employees and partners to be trained, educated on topics and questions that will be important for and after the re-launch, in particular if the level of activity of your business unfortunately reduces their level daily work.

Also, you can decide yourself to create trainings, courses or videos/tutorials for your customers, employees or partners on these same platforms to share necessary knowledge and information.

Example: E-learning/Tutorials/Videos on how to use electronic communication or new selling platforms efficiently.

Partner-Matchmaking tool (c1)

How do I find a partner that I trust in?

  • public-private-partnership (with local cantons)
  • network events for smes local business leaders network (-> rotary club, soropimists)
  • banks as a facilitator to bring businesses together
  • community relationships, expert workshops to bring together entrepreneurs

Collective Purchasing Power tool (c2)

  • click and order supplies via platform by certain date with other suppliers with the same needs
  • collective bulk purchase to increase purchasing power and ability to tap into larger supply chain
  • local supply pickup point

Customer Loyalty Crowdsourcing tool (c3)

  • allow your top 100, 500? customers to express their preferences for which products they would like you to continue to offer, or which products they would like to purchase in the next month.
  • enable SMEs to lower their risk of carrying the wrong product inventory, less waste
  • enable SMEs to see/predict trends,better plan forecasts, try new categories

Digital Business Model Assessment tool - checklist on Day 2 (c4)

  • evaluate every aspect of business model to determine what can and what must change to digital tools and digital environment: what kind of products, inventory storage, customer purchasing, invoicing, delivery, etc.
  • create a new unique value proposition
  • connect to consultants, students, etc. who can offer the assessment
  • offer short -term recommendations - digital payments, pay-in-advance, set time-slot delivery or pick-up.

Learnings of corona crisis (d1)

The University «Fachhochschule Bern» launched a survey in connection with the corona crisis in start-up- and sme-companys. The focus of this survey was “Building resilient and agile organizations”.

Context
SMEs and startups facing challenges to:
a) resolve urgent issues to maintain operations,
b) adapt the organisation,
c) re-position strategically to new market environments
d) build resilience capability to cope with future threats
d) in all steps: ensure timeliness and optimise resource deployment. It also appears that organizations that have developed agile innovation and management methods have been more resilient in the covid-10 crisis. Unfortunately, most companies and organizations have not learned agile innovation and management methods before the crisis, and these methods are mostly taught during in-person seminars or hackathons.

Due to lack of time during this Hackathon, only about a quarter of the total survey feedback could be evaluated. Nevertheless, with the 126 responses evaluated, a fairly clear picture is already emerging.

The evaluation has shown that the largest share (around 90%) of the problems caused by the corona crisis can be attributed to the loss of orders. The majority of customers have postponed or cancelled orders.

A further problem arose from the respective supply chains and the dependencies on suppliers and transport. Many suppliers had to reduce production efficiency or even stop production due to the physical distance rule and risk group protection. Furthermore, products and materials could often hardly be procured or delivered.

Interestingly, relatively few difficulties due to home office activities were mentioned. Only the more cumbersome implementation of meetings and the increased need for communication, as well as communication difficulties were mentioned in a small percentage of cases.

List of further threats (health, security) (d2)

This time, the trouble came as a virus. Last main crisis was about subprimes. But mainy other threads can impact our system because it is not resilient by design. Here is a list of potential risks that we can imagine:

  1. Natural disasters
    1. Big huricanes or typhoon in the Altantic or Pacific oceans have the potency to alt large part of the industrial countries (USA, Japon, Taiwan, China, …)
    2. Earthquake (such as San Andrea split in California)
    3. Tsunamis, …
  2. Financial
    1. Banks and/or credit system collapse
    2. Money supply collapse
  3. Industrial disasters
    1. Nuclear plants
    2. Biochemical leaks
    3. Key resource supplier (remember RAM memory shortage some years ago, from one factory fire or local disaster)
    4. ...
  4. Wars
    1. Between states
    2. Internal in a state (civil war)
    3. Terrorism
    4. ...
  5. Viruses
    1. Natural
    2. Human build
  6. Digital risk
    1. Internet collapse
    2. Electricity network collapse

Resilience by design (d3)

  1. Supply chain  [ref: challenges faced in d.1: adapt the organisation / build resilient capability]
    Supply chain should be spread other many different routes, in the structure of a network, rather than a tree (i.e. different possibilities to access a specific resource):
    1. Suppliers in the vicinity: the longest the supply chain, the less resilient, so (if possible) choose nearby suppliers (survey: “we are dependent on closed suppliers and can therefore no longer work. Domino effect”). The nearby suppliers will be close at time as the client, so no Domino effect).
    2. Suppliers need to be partners, i.e. build strong relationships with them, not just choose them by lowest price. This is easier if condition a. above is done
    3. Multiplicity of suppliers: have more than one for the kes/strategic parts of services needed
    4. Rediscover some sort of stocking for key parts or services. Just in time might be more efficient, but also less resilient
  2. Customers and trade [ref: challenges faced in d.1: reposition to new market environment]
    As for suppliers, spreading the risk between many entities reduces risk of collapsing. Customers should also be diverse in characteristics: large and small companies, different industries, different type of relationships, based in different countries (survey: “Export slump”), etc. As in every ecosystem, diversity increases resilience because in one group collapses, others might not, or not at the same time.
  3. Financial situation [ref: challenges faced in d.1: adapt the organisation / build resilient capability]
    Companies should be encouraged to have some cash-flow always at hand. May be it should be mandatory (by law) that companies have a few months in cash flow at the bank, in order to be able to survive droughts (at least for large “too big to fail” companies). (survey: Finance:“lack of reserve” and Trade: “Cancelled  orders or postponed -no investments at the moment-” and ”Customers postpone orders until autumn or later”)
  4. Employees [ref: challenges faced in d.1: adapt the organisation / build resilient capability] (survey: Employees: “Employees are insecure” and “Home office is inefficient”)
    Employees should be trained to be able to support the  resilient organisation, i.e.:
    • Digital knowledge, how to handle new digital communication tools
    • Better understanding of the organisation procedures in case of crises
    • Management should also be closer to employees (holacratie, participative management, etc.) to reduce fear, anxiety in time of crises

  5. Customer channels [ref: challenges faced in d.1: adapt the organisation / build resilient capability]
    Digitalise everything that can be … but at the same time keep “analog” tools too! The next crisis might take away the Internet!? We don't know. Keep different channels open (survey: “Trainings, Events and Workshops were all cancelled”)
  6. Production [ref: challenges faced in d.1: build resilient capability] Organise production with small and autonomous units (survey: production: “Due to the 2m distance and hygiene rules a production collapse occurred”)
  7. Product [ref: challenges faced in d.1: reposition to new market environment]

    Diversity of product offering, think of “low-tech” product alternative (survey: “Basic supply is in the foreground. Premium products are not in demand.”)

    User-centered design (maximize utility)