Business continuity amidst work-from-home

Being FY closing, it was critical that all departments at Apollo Tyres were able to work together seamlessly. It was also important to ensure that the company continued to service its partners without disruption

- NEERAJ MEHTA

The world is going through some unprecedented times, and we are in unchartered waters. It is time for everyone to work together and get over the disruption caused by COVID-19. Luckily for us, even before the lockdown was announced, some of our employees, especially those working in offices, had been put on a weekly roster and others who had a travel history, were working from home.

While dealing with the requirement of the employees who had started to work from home, we started to prepare for what lay ahead of us in terms of IT and communication infrastructure requirement. A quick discussion with business teams and senior management helped us identify the areas where business continuity was critical.

Apollo Tyres primarily follows the B2B sales process and so we identified the process areas like ‘order to cash’. This area has two touchpoints: one is through the telephone, which is managed by the dedicated Call Centre. To deal with this, we identified the components of the Call Centre that required continuity and provided executives with laptops and data cards so that they can work from home.

To ensure there is no disruption in their services, we decided to divert the Call Centre telephone extensions to the individual mobile phone numbers. Using the laptop and data card, the executives connect to the VPN from their home network, log into the company’s CRM of the through it, and continue to book orders received on the phones from the dealers.

The second touchpoint is our B2B (Sampark) Portal. This portal is already available to all our dealers through web. Our team encourages dealers to make maximum use of this portal and the Apollo Sampark App to place an order and call the agents only if they face a problem.