S TAT E O F T H E I N D U S T RY
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Increased Remote Connectivity is Improving Business Capabilities Remote work is helping improve business productivity and overcome some of the industry’s workforce challenges. Impacts of COVID-19 What have been some of the biggest challenges your company, and the industry as a whole, has faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic? I think COVID had positive and negative impacts. Certainly the negative impact of COVID has been more employee related. We got started early on it; given the global [presence] we have, we’ve been in it since December when it started in China. We learned quite a few lessons upfront which we’ve been able to leverage globally. I think people are getting more and more comfortable with video chats,
they’re getting comfortable with remote work. This whole notion of remote connectivity has really taken off. It’s been like that within the organization and also outside the organization. We have many customers who typically would have come into the location whether to do a site survey, or testing; we’ve been able to do all of that remotely. We have implemented a new kind of remote technology on our test stand. For example, we hosted a day at our site for a large OEM [customer] which normally has a lot of aspects to undertake. We were able to mimic exactly what we would do normally. We
responses submitted by Naimesh Dave, President, Oilgear were able to have different functional teams participate accordingly and walk them through and that was very well accepted by the customer. This trend around the ability to now work remotely, connect remotely, there is a long-term impact and it will continue to get supported based on what we see and as a way to attract talent. Have the challenges brought to light any potential opportunities for change or improvement within your company, or the industry? I think the positive and what has improved since is the levels of productivity. Across the board travel has been down internally and for our customers as well. It’s amazing when we step back and think about how much time we used to spend traveling. Some travel is absolutely necessary, but much was really not necessary and we just used to do it because we were used
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