Many countries came to an abrupt halt when World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a ‘pandemic’, leaving governments to implement nationwide lockdowns to some extent.
With economic activity being curtailed and businesses struggling to stay afloat, the “double-A” quality of “agile” and “adapt” becomes crucial as companies carry out their continuity plans in the face of this crisis.
As the coronavirus appears to slow down, countries are preparing to exit these lockdowns by relaxing certain measures first like allowing more businesses to operate. While some businesses have closed down, some are stepping up and thriving in the new normal thanks to digital technology.
Take Malaysia for instance. When the Prime Minister first announced the partial lockdown, , a cloud-based solutions platform for retail and F&B businesses, immediately launched Beep Delivery, a feature on its platform to power food delivery for restaurants.
A uniquely generated link is sent to customers to make an order and the delivery order is then fulfilled by StoreHub’s consortium of on-demand delivery partners. This contactless feature would enable businesses to continue to generate revenue as the company (StoreHub) takes a very little cut of it – a delivery fee at 2-percent as opposed to most 3rd party delivery marketplace apps that command 30-percent.
This is to ensure both the restaurant can keep operating and revenue generating while their customers to adhere to social distancing.
Tech supported healthcare
Healthcare professionals being on the frontlines, have had it more than anyone of us. They are not only faced with multiple challenges; they are also burdened with endless administrative paperwork.
To ease the situation, Vidado, an AI platform whose machine learning engine lets companies digitalise handwriting in near-real-time, stepped up to offer their tech for FREE to anyone processing CDC forms with better than human speed at 98% accuracy.
Vidado automatically sorts and extracts the content upon scanning the document even the ones with low-quality handwriting. This evidently saves a whole lot of time, as doctors and nurses would not need to manually key in the data.
Expectations of the word “normal” is not the same as it was the beginning of the year. But, no doubt agility and being able to adapt are crucial qualities to possess, as it gives businesses the ability to shift perspective and innovate during crisis times.
