Planned Foresight is the Key to SirionLabs’ Response to the COVID-19 Crisis

Like everyone else, we at SirionLabs are closely following the COVID-19 developments around the globe. Our thoughts are with those for whom the virus has had the greatest impact.

During such times of change and uncertainty, we want you to know how SirionLabs is ensuring a safe and productive environment for our people and maintaining the high standards of system performance and services that our clients have come to expect from us.

Safeguarding supply chains

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a key priority for businesses is to keep their supply chain operational and reliable. Enterprises need to have clear visibility of their risk exposure across suppliers (especially the strategic ones), proactively monitor and fix supplier performance issues – especially for critical deliverables, plug invoice leakages, minimize governance costs, etc.

Sirion’s advanced contract lifecycle management functionality is enabling our clients to accomplish all of the above to secure their business outcomes, mitigate risk and minimize cost and spend leakage.

Clients are employing Sirion’s AI-driven contract extraction capabilities to extract contractual obligations and key terms from their legacy contracts at scale, making it possible to quickly analyze clauses related to force majeure events, business continuity, termination, insurance, etc. across the entire contract portfolio. Further, Sirion is helping clients handle the rapidly evolving situation by facilitating contract change management, automatically updating all downstream obligations. Sirion is now building an AI-enabled COVID response dashboard to help companies get a 360-degree view of contractual relationships across the world (visualized as a world map) along with insights into contracts with high risk exposure, revenue impact caused by affected suppliers, impact on DSO cycles and payment terms, etc.

A cloud-first, true SaaS solution, our technology is helping critical business sectors including healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) stay on top of the crisis by ensuring that they can continue working with their suppliers and mitigate risks posed by the COVID-19 crisis.

Ensuring employee safety and well-being

While many companies are now in the process of making the transition to a work-from-home environment, SirionLabs’ entire employee base has been remote ready for some time. Due to our strong business continuity readiness, we were able to quickly and seamlessly transition our entire workforce to a ‘work from home’ set-up.

We have ensured that every employee has a reliable internet connection (and back-up internet connection) at home with adequate bandwidth to support high-quality conference calls, video conferencing, and of course running the enterprise applications that they need for their work. Besides providing a primary VPN tool to allow our employees to access company assets and data on a remote basis securely, a secondary VPN connection is also available should the primary fail.

We have put additional HR measures in place to ensure employee engagement and well-being. Examples include COVID specific enhanced family medical cover; employee engagement initiatives such as online quiz, parties and coffee meetings; regular internal surveys to keep a check on our employee’s health & safety; and daily interactions with the leadership team.

Maximizing remote productivity

When working virtually, agility in terms of maintaining a dynamic and productive environment is the key to having an engaged workforce. The utilization of collaboration tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom are proving to be extremely critical.

Regular morning and evening team meetings help ensure that our teams have a clear understanding of their goals and key performance metrics are closely monitored to ensure that performance is on a par with what our people were accomplishing when they were working from the office.

However, there is also a human side to consider. Our company-wide daily cadence via Zoom (see image below) eliminates the potential feelings of isolation that can arise when people are not physically in one place. Establishing a sense of connectedness through video conferencing reminds everyone that they are not alone.

Product development and client support

Our development roadmap has always been clearly documented and communicated to all internal teams. Our decentralized development and decision-making process built around a ‘pod structure’ has ensured that our release cadence continues as planned with no impact due to the COVID crisis. We leverage tools such as JIRA to assist with managing work prioritization and issue resolution and Slack for internal communication.

We are also ensuring enhanced communication and collaboration measures to support our clients. This includes:

• Regular communications and updates regarding our contingency/business continuity plans
• Daily standup meetings within each account team
• All in-person meetings have been converted to video calls
• We understand that the immediate focus areas for most of our customers may have changed. Accordingly, we have set up a task force specifically focused on addressing these requests across our client base.

Besides ensuring that we can fully assist our clients to maintain their critical supply chains during what is a major global crisis, the above measures also reinforce our deep level of commitment to be there for our employees and customers.

To sum up, we are in this together and will get through it together.