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First lessons from the COVID-19 crisis

Posted on 2020-03-02

Dear Reader,

 

First of all, we hope all of you, your families, your team members are safe, in particular those living in the most impacted areas in and around Wuhan.

 

At the beginning of Chinese New Year, the COVID-19 crisis hit us, spreading around China and now around the world. As many other companies did, Siveco initiated an action plan ‘Safe Office, Safe Business’ on January 26, aiming to take proactive measures. Support services continued throughout the holidays and full operation resumed at the beginning of February, with most staff working remotely.

 

Supporting our customers in the crisis

 

Many of our customers that operate such essential infrastructures as water treatment, waste incinerators, power supply, etc. and never stopped working. Some other clients such as district heating & cooling or property management firms rely on our solutions to trace all sanitizing actions and to reduce face-to-face contacts. Manufacturing clients are trying to resume normal operations, some of them prioritizing maintenance and considering to computerize HSE management. In many cases, clients still have staff stuck at home, unable to carry out their normal duties.

 

Our first priority has been to support those clients and to tailor our services to address their special needs in this crisis: elearning, smart glasses for remote maintenance, remote coaching, more webinars, quick deployment of HSE modules for existing clients etc.

 

Many of our clients took decisive actions in this fight, also trying to build new strengths for when good times return. This is what some of our Siveco China customers are doing:

 

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A large multisite environmental utility has accelerated their usage of the bluehoney online training course, as many of their maintenance staff now have free time to study maintenance and asset management theory and best practices.

 

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A municipal water company in South China is managing all COVID-19-related activities in bluebee®, ensuring the traceability of their actions for regulatory compliance and water quality.

 

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A property management company in Shanghai is using bluebee® for WeChat to record all disinfection work and is rolling out the system to two more properties during this time. Quoting their GM “we have a window of opportunity, teams are not as busy as usual, they can make progress on bluebee®”.

 

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A large chemical plant is making good use of the forced shutdown time to rethink their maintenance strategy, to look again at their big corporate IT systems and to consult (remotely) with Siveco.

 

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A major gas supplier is very actively preparing a rapid, massive, deployment of Coswin to catch-up lost time and to reinforce their management capability.

 

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A district cooling company relies on bluebee® to ensure communication between maintenance and operation while minimizing face-to-face contacts. They have asked for increased support from Siveco to ensure reliable operation of the mission-critical system.

 

I have no doubt that these companies will emerge stronger from the crisis!

 

A robust systematic approach to HSE

 

Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) has of course been a hot topic in China in the past few years, but as everyone is now impacted in their daily life, their family life, it has taken a new meaning. For many years already, Siveco has been campaigning for a robust approach to HSE based on systematic technical management (government audits have shown that in China technical problems are almost invariably the main cause of accidents), in addition to only superficial safety management measures (signs, personal protection equipment, emergency procedures…). Indeed, all the talk about a “safety culture” is meaningless without a systematic approach to technical management, often starting with inspections (not just ticking boxes in a paper form, but traceable, auditable, inspections with systematic feedback, analysis and follow-up actions).

 

 

Some of our clients took actions very early, as retailer Carrefour China, which launched its Risk Prevention Management System (RPMS) in 2011 and has worked with Siveco ever since. Carrefour China is now owned by Chinese retailer Suning and is using the highly-visual RPMS to manage their response to the COVID-19 crisis, as they have done for all previous crisis. As Carrefour China’s Risk Prevention Vice President used to say “Clausewitz spoke of the fog of war, thanks to RPMS we can see through this fog”.

 

 

Customer satisfaction is our priority

 

Siveco has long made customer satisfaction its priority, paying to this overused concept much more than lip service. We have long been ISO 9001 certified and remain the only company in our field in Asia to be certified (for our full scope of business: sales, implementation, support, design and development of maintenance management system and related mobile solution; sales and execution of maintenance improvement services). We run yearly customer satisfaction surveys, audited by Bureau Veritas as part of our Quality Management system. The report is sent to all our clients and a summary is made public, every year.

 

We are pleased to share our summary of latest 2019 Customer Satisfaction Survey report. Satisfaction remains high, in progress when it comes to the “strongly agree” categories (we let you discover the details in the report) with good insights into the importance of HSE (of direct relevance during the COVID-19 crisis) and future needs.

 

I thank our clients for their trust over the years. Some of them have been with us since we started in 2004, with a single site, now working with us across dozens of joint-ventures, hundreds of sites, all across Asia.

 

As the crisis is far from over in China and the virus is spreading all over the world, it is likely that the battle will be tough and long. Resilient people and companies will be proactive the fight and build strengths for the future. At Siveco, we will continue to play our role in supporting you!

 

Bruno Lhopiteau
Managing Director
Siveco China

 


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