Subsidy Removal: Embracing Cloud for Business Continuity.
As we are affected by the Petrol prices that have nearly tripled in Nigeria, this is a hit on businesses and millions of households who rely on petrol for power and movement of vehicles; angering the citizens and causing a spike in transport costs.
As published in the Punch News Paper dated June 13, 2023;
Economically, subsidy removal is good news, and it is overdue, but it is happening at the wrong time. Better still, there are things to be done to reduce the negative impacts on the citizens and this needs to be discussed.
The bad thing about this good news is the fact that the necessary mechanisms were not put in place before making such a pronouncement. Fuel queues surfaced at the filling stations immediately after the pronouncement by President Bola Tinubu, during his inauguration speech, when he said, “Subsidy is gone.” All filling station owners have started hoarding the available products, thereby causing artificial scarcity, which is bringing about the demand pull and cost push inflation for petroleum products, and other goods and services. The increase in fuel price will cause the cost of transportation to go high, which equally has a multiplier effect on the wellbeing of the people by increasing the prices of goods and services, especially food inflation. Many businesses are going to close down, and many people will lose their jobs. If urgent measures are not put in place, Nigerians should expect more crimes from those who will do anything to eat.
Business Process Automation as become an effective solution for most business that are using on premise software/ applications for their daily operations which helps in real time processing of data and reporting; thereby increasing Productivity and Performance. However, most organizations are struggling to keep the business in motion due to the recent hype in fuel price; affecting their staff mobility, well being and resources for daily operations. Some companies are beginning to work from home despite the fact that it will cause them to revert to manual but there is still the fear of losing track of performance and productivity. Of course, we know that this will as well affect the income and Return on Investment.
The adoption of the cloud implies a paradigm shift in order to meet business challenges: business, government, healthcare, and retail organizations need to streamline processes, increase efficiency and reduce costs, while ensuring customer safety, product quality, and data integrity. These needs combined with the benefits of the cloud technology – including rapid on-demand scalability – encourage a growing number of organizations to consider its adoption.
Furthermore, those companies that were already using - before the pandemic - the cloud for a limited part of their business have, of course, continued in this direction during the lockdown and now, being more "mature", have started to move data and their workload to the cloud. Cloud flexibility and the "as-a-service" cost allow organizations to quickly adapt capacity to demand, either by infrastructure (IaaS) or software (SaaS) or application (PaaS). Therefore, it is possible to expand the organization capabilities and extend the remote work up to 90% of employees, in a short time, thanks to the flexibility of technology.
Now, the question is how do businesses thrive in this situation we find ourselves?
Migrate your ERP solutions/applications that are on premise to the cloud for continuous access to data/information and daily operations.
Effective use of Information Technology and web based tools.
Also, the best time to implement a Cloud based ERP solution is Now!
