How to Make Your Business More Resilient

The Covid-19 crisis has led to a dramatic rise in volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – VUCA. How can businesses respond?

Covid-19 is a public health emergency. It is also a business emergency. The first phase of the crisis was to react and resolve – ensuring daily challenges were managed in an efficient and coordinated way. At Nexans, we have put in place robust measures to keep our workforce safe. We are safeguarding our supply chains. And we are synchronising our activities with the needs of our customers.

Dealing with the next phase of the crisis is going to be much more complex. Supply chains will continue to face pressure and will require constant monitoring. Pricing models will face new scrutiny. The crisis forces businesses to concentrate on the essentials. This means focusing on purpose. And it means using tools to tackle complexity in a world where VUCA is the new normal.

Nexans is here to help you

Making decisions can seem daunting in the current environment. Everything seems to be happening at the same time. But decisions need to be made. In many cases, the decisions made now will be the most important that businesses ever make.

Digital modelling tools help you to plot a course through all this complexity. Nexans is supporting its customers with two new digital tools to help them make the best decisions. Our aim is to help you to optimise your capital allocation and to get the most out of your resources.

Smart Inventory Management (SIM). Our cable customers need to be confident that they have stocks available of all the cables and accessories they need to run their businesses – and they need complete visibility of their stock, wherever it is. Most of all, they need an easy way to release the cash tied up in their inventories.

To meet these needs, Nexans has developed Smart Inventory Management (SIM). This allows you to monitor and manage your cable stocks easily in real time. The solution offers automatic stock replenishment, shortage/overstock alerts and full transparency between Nexans’ factories and end-consumers. SIM is delivered via the cloud, so your staff can get access from anywhere. Best of all, it saves you money – reducing your inventory Working Capital Requirement by an average of 50%.

Asset Electrical. Grid operators need to make long-term investment decisions against a background of incredible complexity. As well as striking the right balance between network performance, CAPEX, OPEX and risk, they need to meet targets such as outage reductions.

Our strategic asset management solution for grid operators, Asset Electrical, meets all of these needs. Developed by Nexans and its technology partner Cosmo Tech, it works by creating a digital twin of your network, including all your physical assets and strategies. It even takes asset ageing into account. Asset Electrical allows you to explore “what if” scenarios and calculate what effect different interventions will have on your network.

In fact, you can use Asset Electrical like a journey planner – you decide on the objective (for example, reduced CAPEX) and Asset Electrical maps out how to get there. The results are tangible, with savings of more than 10% of total expenditure and an increased return on assets of over 20%.

The beauty of Asset Electrical and Smart Inventory Management is that they help you to build resilience and reduce your costs. Above all, they provide certainty at a time when it has never been needed more.