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Did the Covid pandemic teach us anything?
Jeanpo Olowo. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- How much time are you spending on a given task? We have all felt the impact of the Covid pandemic in one way or the other. The Ugandan economy was fully opened after nearly two years of the pandemic with the last batch being the boda boda riders allowed to fully operate in February 2022.
Business efficiency could be defined as the ability to maximise your outputs from your given inputs or make the most of your available resources. Simply put it is how well a business can transform its time, money or resources to yield revenue.
How much time are you spending on a given task? We have all felt the impact of the Covid pandemic in one way or the other. The Ugandan economy was fully opened after nearly two years of the pandemic with the last batch being the boda boda riders allowed to fully operate in February 2022.
The economy is slowly regaining its path. The first wave caught many businesses unprepared but when the second wave hit, a few businesses had learnt some lessons from their unpreparedness during the first wave.
For businesses to remain afloat and still do business they invested in information technology infrastructure, came up with new business models and re-strategised to serve their customers better. Many automated their business processes to allow customers to access their services virtually, and online.
Recently we went through an experience that got me questioning whether some businesses, especially the telecommunication companies had learnt anything at all!
We were robbed of our bags and the thieves stole everything from bank visa cards, credit cards, national IDs, driving permits, phones etc.
Has anybody experienced the nightmare of replacing a sim card lately? To do so you must either produce your original national ID or a NIRA information verification letter.
Before the pandemic, we went through a countrywide exercise of registering our simcards with telecommunication companies where personal information like photos, national ID were captured and uploaded in their system.
My question is why are these redundancies and duplications in business processes when you already got this information captured at the time of sim card registration?
And better still one has a soft copy in pdf format which is as good as original because it’s a scanned copy! These inefficiencies are costing you revenue. If I am the owner of a sim card, I am the very person processing a replacement, I have a soft copy in pdf format, why can’t the telecom company verify or cross-reference to validate the information in their system?
This duplication of business processes is costing these businesses a lot of revenue. You have to go to NIRA to get an information verification letter, go back to the telecom, fill a form, they enter the same information as previously entered, these are redundancies in business processes and it is affecting a business through revenue lost as a result of delays and rigidities.
How many customers have been frustrated because of these cumbersome business processes of replacing a simple thing like a sim card? I must applaud some banks like dfcu, Stan Chart and Equity on the other hand cause they did learn from the pandemic. Replacing our visa cards was not a problem at all, in fact it took us just a few minutes and we were back in business.
Business efficiency is about making the best possible use of your business resources. Financial, labour productivity, operational, process, eco and return on investment are some of the examples of business efficiencies any business or company should measure to be effective at their act. The Covid-19 pandemic has taught us to automate our business processes and eliminate redundancies in our business operations. Is your business or company efficient?
Dr Jeanpo Olowo is an advisor/consultant: Financial & Business Operations. [email protected]
