How to effectively build business processes in a company in changing conditions

- The pandemic brought a number of major changes to the way businesses operate. Which business processes were most affected and how did JML manage to adapt to the new conditions?

- The pandemic has entailed, first and foremost, remote working. Our company has always been centered on the fact that the office is a space for meeting with colleagues and clients, not a place where we sit “from call to call”, as is often the case in large companies. We are not a corporation, in our relations the level of formalism is minimal, and our team can be called a family. The main disadvantage of remote work is usually seen as the inability to fully control the working day of employees. On the one hand, this is true. But on the other hand, our business is built in such a way that the team is a family, we all have long-term relationships, and every person in the team is result-oriented. In such a situation, control over employees turns out to be unnecessary. That's why the transition to remote working was not difficult for our company, we were mature, flexible and mobile enough to work successfully in such conditions. In addition, the company is a logistics company, not a manufacturing company, i.e. we provide services, so we had no obstacles to working remotely.

- Have any other work processes been affected by the pandemic?

- We felt the biggest impact of the pandemic in 2020. We work with large woodworking mills. These are companies with a continuous production cycle, and remote work is not possible there. Therefore, our partners experienced serious difficulties related to the pandemic, and we were not left behind. Firstly, human potential suffers from any virus. When people get sick, it becomes difficult or impossible to work. Any business process as an inanimate thing can be debugged, rebuilt. But not when it comes to people. That is why we try to have our employees work remotely, encourage vaccination with bonuses and motivate them by example.

- Are there any positive changes that this crisis has triggered?

- This crisis situation has triggered an intensive development of Internet technologies, a widespread shift to online and remote work. And this, in turn, has led to the fact that we can now devote more time to family and self-development. We can say that we have become more harmonious in our lives: now it is possible to work from the countryside, from a country house, and in order to build a successful career, it is not necessary to be constantly in the center of a megalopolis with its stresses, traffic jams, etc. People are less stressed and less tired, and this, in turn, increases creativity and productivity of a person, his harmony within himself and in relations with society. This is the main positive aspect of the pandemic, something that can and should be capitalized on. In addition, we have received an additional stimulus for more intensive development of online technologies in our company. Now we are planning to develop a personal cabinet for customers on the basis of our website. This will allow you to apply for transportation online and track your cargo. In addition, we are working on the automation of business processes through 1C. Despite all the changes, we are optimistic about the future. JML strategic development plans include increasing turnover, attracting more and more clients to cooperation, improving our service, its optimization and acceleration of all processes and finding the most effective ways to meet the needs of customers in transportation. These are both long-term goals and short-term objectives that we work on every day.