Our lessons from the Covid 19 crisis: Chandresh Dedhia, Head – IT, Ascent Health and Wellness Solutions

Chandresh Dedhia, Head – Information Technology, Ascent Health and Wellness Solutions Pvt Ltd, shares his perspective on how his firm manages to keep the lights on in this challenging atmosphere

Some edited excerpts:

From an IT standpoint, what are some of the key initiatives initiated by your organization in ensuring that business continues as usual?
Ascent Health and Wellness is one of the Pioneers of Digital Transformation in Pharma Distribution domain in India, each and every aspect of our business process is “Digital”. During ongoing Covid-19 crisis, we were able to manage our operations well and with minimal disruption. People unavailability for the first few days was a challenge, but this too was managed well by our on ground teams and we are now providing medicines to all our customers.

What are some of the key challenges faced to ensure a Work from Home Policy?
There were a few challenges that we faced:

Remote Connectivity – VPN was not configured for 100% use cases, but we quickly got into action and made sure 100% of our team are able to access the resources from home.

Availability of Laptops – While looking at an option to hire Laptops for WFH, we realised the opportunistic vendors were quoting 3x-5x of the market price, this forced to think for an alternative and we made the required business arrangements.

Remote Support – Supporting 100% user base was a new challenge for us.

What are some of the key lessons learnt during this crisis?

BCP planning for majority of the organizations around the globe was only for 10%-25% of the selected and critical users. We learnt that we need do BCP for 100% of the users. WFH changed the entire landscape and forced us to re-think about our IT Infrastructure and architecture. Build Infrastructure considering remote user loads and Internet bandwidth should be sufficiently available in such times. Team was not prepared for remote support, this made us start providing cross region remote support. When employees were working from office, we were measuring their productivity on their availability and output, now for WFH we will start measuring their productivity based on their output.

Vendor Management was very important lesson for us, now we have experience the partners who were opportunistic and also partners who genuinely helped us during the crisis.

What are some of the technology tools used to facilitate smooth collaboration between employees?

Being a matured startup, we were already using all the SaaS based tools to communicate, but WFH also ensure the adoption for such tools was 100% now. Some of the tools used by users include: GSuite Services for collaboration, Hangout for video calls, Slack for chat and collaboration and VPN and SDWAN for connectivity

Do you believe that the current mandatory use of remote work for business continuity is a signal to all organizations that it’s time to revisit their remote working policies?
Yes, certainly the organisation will have to change and presume the worst case scenario and redesign their architecture which will help majority of the users to be able to WFH. This however does not mean we enforce user to WFH in Business as usual scenarios. The only exception being the on ground teams which are part of Manufacturing, Logistics and Operations can never ‘Work from Home’.

Also the companies who are digitally transformed, were able to sustain this change and quickly adopted to the new market dynamics. All the companies who are still on the traditional business model have had a huge setback and will take more time to recover from this disaster.