Helping our clients navigate COVID-19’s choppy waters

Like most businesses during these challenging times, Caseware Africa’s main focus has been on maintaining our ability to continue servicing our existing clients, who depend on us to run their businesses.
In pursuit of that goal, we successfully moved our entire workforce offsite ahead of the national lockdown. Our cloud-first strategy has served us well, as the cloud is not only how we deliver our new generation of software to clients, it’s also how we empower our own teams with the tools to build our software and serve our clients. As a result, our software design and development has continued virtually without a break, something that’s very important to us—we know our clients depend on our software to automate key processes, and rely on us to keep their software up-to-date in respect of complying with local regulations and global compliance standards. In short, our clients can continue to receive the support they need on their current products, but they can also be confident that our teams are continuing to work hard in creating the new products that will reimagine existing experiences entirely on the cloud.

Another initiative has been to increase the number of webinars and online training courses for clients, especially those who are working remotely. These cover a range of useful topics, and we see them as an additional service to clients who may be facing specific challenges at the moment, or who may find themselves with extra time on their hands. While we are proud of the response we have been able to make as a company in order to serve our clients, we are also very aware of some significant challenges.

The first relates to our clients, particularly those in the accounting and auditing worlds as well as corporate finance teams. While they can work remotely with great success, their clients are often not in the same position. Many types of work cannot be done remotely—think of mines, retailers, manufacturers, to name a few. Many are clients of our clients, and they are obviously experiencing huge suffering. We and our clients are part of this value chain, and its pain affects us all. This general economic malaise—and all the experts say it will be severe—is not only posing a challenge to existing value chains, it is also reducing the potential for creating new ones. However well prepared we and our clients are, finding new business is likely to be a problem for the foreseeable future across all sectors for the economy. Another hurdle we all face is the management of remote teams. Providing them with the right tools to work with is one thing, keeping them motivated and collaborating with colleagues is quite another. Managers will have to acquire new skills.

These are tough times for all of us, businesses and individuals. With the help of technology and our famous South African resilience, we are finding ways to survive and eventually prosper.

Christiaan Brink, Product Executive, Caseware Africa, a division of Adapt IT. Christiaan holds a degree in Computer Engineering and has extensive product development experience and a passion for technology.  He spent 12 years based in the UK creating software solutions for the investment data industry across EMEA.  Christiaan joined the Adapt IT group in 2019 where he currently leads the product group for the Caseware Africa division.

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