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As cities around the globe face a lockdown, events get postponed, and flights get cancelled, a huge percentage of the global workforce is now suddenly working from home. Managing this enormous remote workforce and ensuring their productivity from home is not hampered is something no organization is prepared for. Yet, leading the organization into a digital future by making it easy for the workforce to operate from home is a pressing concern. How do you enable your sales and marketing teams to continue to nurture relationships even when the office is shut? How do you enable uninterrupted communication between your teams when they’re using their home networks? How do you collaborate and move forward with projects when you can’t meet in person?
The Sudden Surge in Remote Workers
With a massive number of employees now working from home to limit the spread of COVID-19, CIOs across the world are feeling the pressure of maintaining the same levels of productivity and efficiency. Since everyone working from home needs to be able to access the systems and tools they need for their jobs, the onus on supporting the remote workforce to be productive when they’re working from home is entirely on businesses.
Since the surge in remote workers is so sudden, it is a difficult time for organizations to oversee the operations of teams in disparate locations, time zones, and even working hours. Remote work can pose several challenges for business leaders and managers alike – including ensuring real-time communication, maintaining proper cybersecurity practices, and overcoming intermittent connectivity problems.
Organizations where remote working capabilities have not yet been established need to get started immediately. From identifying instant messaging and file sharing requirements to ensuring seamless access to ERP and CRM systems – since the pace and scale of remote access is putting existing enterprise systems under immense strain, now is a good time for organizations to capitalize on their ERP systems and make it easy for remote workers to make the most of their enterprise system.
Although CIOs will have to look into aspects such as enabling workplace collaboration and overcoming network connection issues, here’s how Dynamics 365 systems can help organizations avoid disruption.
1. By ensuring seamless access to enterprise resources using Dynamics 365 cloud
Azure cloud-based Dynamics 365 can ensure sales staff, marketing professionals, finance teams, HR administrators, and project managers can all work just as effectively from home with access to all that they need at their jobs. So, whether it is about speaking to customers, taking or tracking orders, managing inventory, or generating sales reports, in a COVID-19 era, cloud ERPs can ensure seamless functioning of businesses. Since Dynamics 365 cloud can scale dynamically as well as reallocate resources and redistribute load, it can play a great role in ensuring business efficiency is maintained.
2. By enabling real-time communication using Teams
Maintaining communication is critical in a time of turmoil; therefore, to enable real-time communication between users across the organization, leveraging the features and capabilities of Microsoft Teams is the first step. Since Microsoft Teams is already integrated with Dynamics 365 ERP, all users must do is install rich desktop clients instead of web clients to cache information and enjoy a better performance under bandwidth restrictions or networking problems. With more modern communication protocols that can better handle networking issues, users can chat with peers, share files, as well as collaborate on documents in real-time.
3. By facilitating collaboration using O365
Dynamics 365, through integration with Office 365, can also unlock modern ways of remote working. By providing access to tools – irrespective of where users are located – using Office 365, users can easily attend meetings online, share Office files, co-author in real time, and be productive from their respective homes. Users can either work on documents alone or in a group, work on the same files at the same time, and then share them with the entire team to further build ideas.
Sustain Business Value in Turbulent Times
The COVID-19 outbreak has disrupted operations, impacted business continuity, and completely transformed operating models for businesses across the globe. With the pandemic showing no signs of a slowdown, enterprises must respond to the crisis with short-and long-term actions and be prepared for employees working from their homes. For this, it is important that the workforce can get their jobs done from home as efficiently as from offices, so the business is in a better position to sustain value. Capitalizing on ERP systems like Dynamics 365 is a great way for businesses to increase resilience to future disruptions and prepare themselves for uninterrupted long-term growth.
