Continuity & Resilience beyond COVID-19 Coronavirus
Finding the best path through the coming months and years will not be easy. AVISU has the skills and industry knowledge to support these topics and assist you and your business and its services in these uncertain times. Contact us to discuss how we can help.
The emergence and global spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 is creating an unprecedented impact on all parts of our personal, social and professional lives. It is an event that we will be discussing for many years to come. The present challenge is most definitely a humanitarian one with sadly many lives being lost across the globe.
The impact on the Aviation community from the coronavirus pandemic has been profound and no one is sure what the true cost will be or how the recovery will look. The economic impacts and recovery topics will however come into focus as the spread of the coronavirus is slowed and governments and companies start to consider the possibility of reducing control measures. Once the initial decisions and processes were made regarding the health and wellbeing of staff, the next focus will move to business continuity and resilience – how to keep the business alive and services maintained within the complex and changing environment.
For Air Navigation Service Providers this has been an exceptionally difficult task and has had to cover such areas as:
- Minimum Rostering to maintain the service
- Flexible work from home where possible
- Maintaining operational skills and competencies
- Ensuring contingency arrangements
- Maintenance of equipment and software
- Mental health and personnel wellbeing
- Furlough of identified staff and the long-term impact on their state of mind
- Procedures for staff or family members testing positive for COVID-19
The release of local and national COVID-19 movement restrictions and then global travel restrictions will undoubtably occur in a phased approach. How will the public react to these milestones? Will they venture out from the safety of their local area in a steady fashion or will the frustrations of being hemmed into their homes for so long cause a sudden increase in demand for travel? The answers are not clear, however what is clear is the need for aviation service providers and supporting businesses to be ready to react to the demand. Airline operators will be looking to increase supply of travel capacity in a safe and efficient manner.
AVISU is currently active with several global aviation business and service providers and is closely connected to the latest information on recovery scenarios. Current estimates forecast the aviation and travel market to ‘restart’ in early 2021 with the time taken to return to pre-coronavirus levels about 2-3 quarters for domestic travel and more than a year for international travel. So, what is AVISU advising its customers on some of the key items for consideration in these next phases?
- Maintain a focus on business continuity and resilience – the core fundamentals of the business must be protected – a warm restart of the business versus a cold restart will maintain key work processes, quality and safety.
- Use the time of low operational demands to assess the various initial return to demand scenarios to identify key objectives such as staff training, systems and facilities checks, scaling production and distribution etc.
- Commence think-tank sessions on possible new concept of operations and business models that may be needed to match towards a range of different ‘normal’ states of the market for the next five years and beyond. This will affect M&A strategies, capital and operational expenditure forecasts, unique selling points and how to build the business to be more resilient to future crisis effects.
- Plan to manage the organisational changes using sound change management approaches covering enhanced human involvement, safety change and quality principles.