HFS Highlight: Infosys positions BCP planning as a competitive differentiator for manufacturing clients

COVID-19 hit the global manufacturing sector hard as factory production halted across geographies. Manufacturers are forced to provision remote operations, virtual workforces, and supply chain transparency among others due to the pandemic. As factory output stalled, suppliers and manufacturers begin to struggle with cash flow, resulting in layoffs and a frenzy of supplier consolidation, etc. So manufacturers are under pressure to simultaneously reboot operations and alleviate the immediate cash flow pressure.

Through technology and business levers, Infosys has prioritized its 4R approach to support the manufacturing enterprises to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. The 4Rs are:

• Remote Workforce: Solutions for managing distributed workforce enabling collaboration, governance, and enterprise security
• Resilient Systems: Enterprise risk management ensuring business continuity
• Reduce Costs and Risks: Operational cost efficiency through asset and infrastructure management among others
• Reimagine Experience: Virtual environment and infrastructure development for collaboration among stakeholders, partners, and customers

Infosys also developed a return to workplace solution (for contact tracing, sanitization, social distancing, etc.) to ensure the return to normalcy for its clients.

Infosys ensured smooth BCP transition during the pandemic for its manufacturing clients

HFS published manufacturing operations continuity plan article in which we argued that employees and technology infrastructure are the critical success factors for the continuity plan. Infosys also followed the same path to initiate BCP for its manufacturing clients with minimum disruption in the light of COVID-19. Some of its examples include

• For an industrial manufacturer, Infosys ensured remote working (virtual workforce collaboration and secure VPN access) virtually overnight. Infosys also provided support by quickly developing solutions to track personnel and inventory amidst the widespread disruptions
• Infosys collaborated with a large automobile company to finalize the BCP planning at the individual level (to overcome cybersecurity challenges without disruption) and seamlessly enable distributed collaborative, agile delivery for enterprise applications management

Infosys is leveraging its Live Enterprise Suite to build organization resilience

In September 2019, Infosys launched Live Enterprise Suite that enables organizations to drive process agility, deliver customer delight, and enhance ecosystem value. As COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation journey of the enterprises, so Infosys is leveraging this platform to enable enterprise digital innovation journey including the COVID-19 response.

Some of the key capabilities of Live Enterprise Suite include

• Enterprise talent transformation journey with Infosys Wingspan: Learning solution that supports continuous learning in a digital environment to prepare existing talent for future needs
• Hyper personalized and cognitive user experience with the Experience Configurator: Captures human behavior and renders contextual content
• Cloud agnostic application stack through the Infosys Polycloud Platform: Enables a common interface and catalog to manage platform and application services workloads across the enterprise
• Organizational knowledge and intelligence for the enterprise through the Infosys Digital Brain Solution: Capturing and analyzing enterprise ecosystem data to orchestrate intelligent responses to emerging events
• Employee onboarding through a one-stop Launchpad app: Enables a paperless onboarding experience and guides new hires from the pre-joining stage until they onboard

Bottom Line: Take advantage of the crisis to build agility and resilience – Infosys leverages BCP as a stepping stone for future transformation rather than an emergency business continuity plan

To date, BCP in manufacturing was focused on short term failure in production, supply chain, or technology infrastructure. But COVID-19 has shown that the disruption can persist and manufacturers need more robust planning and risk management practices for business continuity Many of the pandemic’s changes are here to stay for the long term, thus have strong implications for the impending digital transformation. Overall, BCP has evolved from a “hygiene factor” to “critical importance”. Infosys is leveraging its digital innovation and transformation related solutions and frameworks to support BCP planning so that some of the transformation tenets can be adopted beforehand and embedded in organizations on a permanent basis.