Ensure pandemic preparedness

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Managing and supporting pandemic response
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Pandemic preparedness services from Bell

Worried about weathering a pandemic?

The H1N1 virus is a threat that will impact individuals, businesses and governments on a global scale. For organizations, the impact could be significant, as the World Health Organization estimates that a flu pandemic could raise workplace absenteeism by up to 40%.

But proper planning and infrastructure can ensure that business continues uninterrupted even under difficult circumstances.

What kind of punch does a pandemic pack?

As witnessed with SARS and again with the H1N1 virus, diseases can spread around the globe in a matter of hours, impacting businesses virtually overnight.

There are known outcomes:

Rapid erosion of the workforce
Compromised supply chain
Reduced demand for products and services

And the unknown:

How temporarily losing a big part of the workforce will impact communications, operations and business as a whole

Build in resilience

To effectively manage the risks of a pandemic, your organization needs to build in agility and resiliency. Technology can play a major role in both with remote networking, Web-enabled hosted applications, greater system redundancy and more.

You can ensure business continuity by:

Developing teleworking policies and procedures, and provisioning tools to enable remote working capabilities
Developing multi-channel service approaches to meet customer demands and reduce calls to you contact centre
Increasing call rerouting capabilities
Enabling employee collaboration through audio conferencing, video conferencing and Web conferencing

Sound daunting? It doesn't have to be. It's just a matter of assessment, planning and action. You'll need to:

Create a business continuity plan that takes customer service, operations and supply chain into account
Assess network capacity and plan remediation of shortcomings
Educate and inform staff on the plan of action and keep them up to date
Provision services based on business priorities

Bell can help with all these stages of assessment, planning and action. Our pandemic preparedness solutions draw upon expertise in many areas in order to help with all aspects of preparedness.