Q: How has your organisation helped mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 crisis?

Our organisation has always been agile and receptive to change. This is embedded in our corporate DNA.

And as such, we were quickly able to adjust to the ‘new normal’ – and we set ourselves a few important priorities at the onset.

The first was ensuring the safety of our global workforce. The second was making sure our customers and business partners were serviced in the most efficient manner. Lastly, we looked at the need to mitigate the negative impacts of COVID 19 on the business itself.

We did the above by implementing our robust BCP plans across the world; our investments in systems and technologies enabled us to work seamlessly from home, thereby ensuring minimal disruption to our business operations.

And we looked at our internal processes and identified measures to bring down costs, most of which were short term, though some cost saving measures were long term in nature.

During this time, we maintained close engagement with our customers and followed through on all opportunities that were presented to us. We also took the crisis as an opportunity to expedite several initiatives, which we hope will continue to make our organisation more agile, flexible and lean.

I must point out that we also received untold support and encouragement from all our stakeholders – specifically our major shareholder Sagawa Holdings, which was a tower of strength to us during these trying times.

We established several tasks forces and teams across the organisation to assess our revised priorities and take necessary actions. Regular engagement and correspondence enabled us to ensure that we continued to monitor the situation on an almost daily basis, thus enabling us to focus our business initiatives effectively.

Q: In what spheres has this assistance made a mark, in your view?

The pandemic enabled us to refocus our energies on the key aspects of the business. Given the disruptions to global supply chains, we were able to bring in changes to our operating models and adapt accordingly.

Given that most of our regular customers and their businesses were impacted by the pandemic, we looked to leverage our expertise and strengths across the network – and thereby serve new customers while meeting the new requirements of existing clients.

We were able to further broaden our customer portfolio and service mix, both of which were key strategic initiatives pursued by the company.

The pandemic further accelerated our focus on the use of data and information. So by constantly working with our companies, we were able to enhance the visibility of the business to more prominent levels as opposed to what prevailed in the past.

Ultimately, this enabled us to make better informed decisions quickly. We have continued to adopt these practices in our operations to this day and hope to continue to do so in the future as well.