Post COVID-19 - Challenges and Opportunities for Indian IT Industry

Almost every country across the globe has been affected by the devastating Corona Virus disease. An outbreak originated from China has gone everywhere and in last few months, Corona’s epicenter has shifted from China to Europe to the United States.

The IT industry has been India’s crown jewel in our country’s economic growth story for the past two decades and the IT industry has provided global recognition for Indian youth’s technology and entrepreneurial capabilities. The current situation due to lock-down has also affected the Indian IT Industry with lots of challenges and shows path to many opportunities.

Challenges are many

Although work from home may become the new normal in the coming days till the covid-19 pandemic is brought under control. Most of the organizations were unprepared for employees to work from home. About two-thirds of the IT workforce across the country have moved to a work-from-home model to keep services continuous during the lock-down.

This crisis has exposed limitations of smaller vendors in providing business continuity to their partners, and hence the services have been affected due to lack of Work from Home infrastructure by these smaller vendors.

This crisis has affected education, healthcare, transport, manufacturing and almost every other sector of the society.

Worldwide supply chain has been badly hit by this pendemic and this outbreak is affecting supply chains and disrupting manufacturing operations around the world. There is a mounting pressure to reduce supply chain costs and hence motivating companies to pursue strategies such as lean manufacturing, offshoring and outsourcing. These cost-cutting measures mean that when there is a supply-chain disruption, manufacturing will stop quickly because of a lack of input parts.

Various Opportunities

Educational institutions will need to consider modernizing and need to integrate classroom and distance learning.

The aftermath of the pandemic will also provide an opportunity to learn from a plethora of social innovations and experiments, ranging from working from home to large-scale surveillance systems. Now most of the organization have learnt from the current situation and will adopt to digital transformation and their cloud adoption will see a surge.

I believe there would be an increased role of the leadership in providing direction, energizing teams & connecting the dots. Periodic online meetings will be the new norm to synchronize work force. There would be a sudden requirement for solutions for Tailored communication tools catering to different scenarios, Result-oriented performance management at all levels – individual, team enabled by digital dashboard.

The spend on R&D and development of innovative tools will increase. We have recently seen that Ministry of IT (Government of India) has already announced an award for startups to develop collaboration tools for communication.

A resilient supply chain must be able to detect early warning signs of a disruption and it must respond by shifting production to alternative sources. It must have either a diversified supply base or some contingency plan to utilize backup suppliers. Of course, for a business to detect a disruption, it must have a good handle on what its supply chain looks like. It's not enough to know your suppliers; you must also know who your supplier's suppliers are. Companies that are more resilient will be able to survive or even gain market shares. In the long term, companies should think about turning crisis management into risk management.

Every major business that is heavily dependent on suppliers or consumers located in regions affected by the corona virus should think about diversifying their supply bases. The better solution is to diversify the supply base, so as to have uncorrelated sources of supply. So that when one set of suppliers may be down due to a regional problem, another set might still be in operation.

Way forward

Educational Institutions will need to modernize the learning methodologies and adopt to online distance learning. Software companies have already announced to allow 50% employees to work from home and reduce the office infrastructure costs etc.

Society has seen clear environment and its benefits due to staying at home, hence there shall be more emphasis on clean energy, electric vehicles and more use of Solar products.

Some of the critical factors which will help optimize and change the Supply chain business model are like creating a transparent view of a multi-tier supply chain with identifying the critical components for the operations. A risk index for each BOM commodity, based on criticality and location of suppliers, will help identify those parts at highest risk.

New supply chain will have an intelligent procurement module with supply chain controls based on risk index. Supply chain data management with effective use of Artificial Intelligence, analytics and automation will be new tools of management.

This will lead to Supply chain simulation software which will take inputs of risk index of BOM, suppliers and partner and plan for contingencies.

Globally, Sourcing and production will move closer to end customer due to optimization of supply chain costs. India will have great opportunity to attract more global manufacturing in India.

This Corona epidemic has exposed lots of holes and risks in various businesses, however, the opportunities are immense and needs to be grabbed.

By: Mr.Bohitesh Misra, Co-founder, Xiphias Xpay Life