Kinly Blog | Visual Collaboration News & Insights

Business continuity vs Coronavirus outbreak

Written by Knut Bentzen | Mar 6, 2020 5:58:09 PM

Kinly continues to closely monitor the situation surrounding the Coronavirus (COVID-19) through the advice of Public health authorities, as well as our Supply Chain and Partners. Our main priorities are the health and wellbeing of people – both those who work for and with Kinly, as well as for and with our customers and partners.

People
Kinly is doing everything we can to minimize the risk for any of the above mentioned to be exposed for, or infected with the virus. This is our priority number one.

We have for your information issued extensive internal instructions to adhere to Public health authorities advice, and evaluate these on a daily basis. A short extract of these measures below:

  • We only travel when strictly necessary, we prefer to meet remotely with video
  • We do not travel to high risk areas, as per WHO’s map & list and country recommendations
  • If you feel uncomfortable about travelling at all, you do not have to travel
  • If you have travelled to a high risk area, or it became high risk during your travel, you are asked to not come in to work for two weeks, unless confirmed not infected by your doctor
  • If you have to stay at home because you might have been infected, you can work remotely. Consult your manager/HR in these cases as not all Kinly employees have jobs that can be done remotely, ie. install technicians and on-site support. Under no circumstances can you go to work outside of your quarantine if you may be or have become infected.

Supply Chain
Kinly works close with it’s vendors and suppliers and has collected information from manufacturers about upcoming potential challenges related to production and their delivery capacity due to the Coronavirus outbreak.  

At current state, we do not have projects at serious risk of not being delivered due to failing supplies or personnel situation.

To mitigate the risk however, we:

  • Focus on managing goods, distributers & vendors to secure delivery
  • Set up local/global Supply Chain Incident management teams to stay on top of the situation
  • Monitor alternative solutions continuously if standard options should fail to deliver
  • Maintain strong vendor & supplier relations to be first in line when situation normalize
  • May order goods to our/distributor warehouse early if terms & conditions agreed w/customer

Any official statements that we receive, when made available to us, we will forward on request to our clients and we would ask that you contact us if you have concerns regarding any lead times or possible changes to project schedules that may possibly arise from extended delivery times or shortage of goods.

We also suggest that where possible clients proactively engage with us on potential forward ordering of kit against future large project requirements in an attempt to assist our proactive order planning with vendors.

Business Continuity
In the current situation of emerging travel restrictions there is clearly an increased need to utilize video-based collaboration tools. Kinly as a Trusted Advisor has also investigated how we can help our Clients maintain operations with a minimum of disruption. Together with some of our key vendors, we have evaluated what may be done to not only utilized current physical and virtual video room estate the best.

A repository of information and advice will be available on www.kinly.com/blog and the www.kinly.com/resources. There will also be extended free trial options from both Cisco and Pexip for those in need of rapid expansion of their current estate. Likely more options will arise here in the coming weeks and months, we will announce these accordingly.

Please contact your account manager to discuss any appropriate measure to take or reach out to us though our contact form.

Final note
Kinly will work tirelessly and encourage as proactive and transparent dialogue as possible for a period until the situation is normalized, but also need to highlight that we are in some aspects largely in the hands of our manufacturers and their logistics networks.  

We will do everything we can to ensure that impact can be kept to a minimum and thank you for your support in working this out together.