The ‘Beast from the East’ and Month End

Malcolm Brock

Managing Director Brovanture

 

Looking across an empty Brovanture office this morning, 1 March 2018, got me thinking.

The ‘Beast from the East’ has had a significant impact on the number of our staff who could get to the office today due to heavy snowfalls last night and more due later today. (For those of you not in the UK, we are experiencing very cold and snowy weather coming in from Siberia which had been given the name ‘the Beast from the East’ by our news and weather media) Fortunately, in our industry, my staff can and have the technology to, work from home so I have told them to avoid the risk of traveling and stay safe at home.

Back to my thoughts. It is 1 March so we are, of course, in the middle of month end. As I get reports and discuss progress with finance I realize how fortunate we are to be using great technology that enables us to communicate, share information and just get on with the many tasks involved no matter where my team is.

For some organizations, the arrival of this uncharacteristically bad weather with this timing must be an absolute nightmare. In some parts of the UK, it is not a case of telling staff not to come to work, with many inches of snow and sub-zero temperatures they just cannot get to work. Without the right systems and technology, the result will be that month end processes cannot be completed so dates will be missed and vital information needed to plan and make decisions will be late. What will be the cost that this will add to the already mounting costs of not being able to operate the business due to the bad weather? And, of course, how quickly will the organization be able to re-plan and take action to take account of what is happening?

Now is not the time to start thinking about business systems and technology. It is ‘all hands to the pumps’ to deal with the immediate problems of today. But, maybe it would be worth taking a few seconds to put a note on your calendar to look at this in a couple of weeks’ time when things have got back to normal.

I would be very happy to talk to you about the sort of finance systems, both Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) which we use, and provide to our customers, that mean major events like we are experiencing today can be dealt with both efficiently and effectively.

If you are in a bad weather affected area of the UK please take care and stay safe over the next few days.