Business View Caribbean | December 2020

26 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN DECEMBER 2020 arrangements – thinking about business disruptions in general, like hurricanes and fires and floods. Our IT systems had been working towards doing everything from the cloud and our technicians could do their service reports and schedules on their phones. So, when COVID happened, and we all had to work from home, it was a fairly simple transition. Site employees still had to report to sites, albeit at lower levels for a while, and we made all efforts to keep them safe. “And we keep leveraging more technology. Developing a lot of links where we’re using BMS (Building Management Systems) to monitor and manage components of buildings from offsite. We can see if the temperature is too high or too low, or the pressure is incorrect, and we can adjust that from mobile device. We are continually training our staff to use technology services inhouse with our own staff. Those initiatives resulted in growth opportunities for us. In addition to just doing facilities management, we were doing specific single- service items in the janitorial line and it opened up our market a lot in terms of what we can do for clients. That diversification allowed the company to grow significantly over the last four to five years and made us a lot stronger.” BVC: How has COVID-19 impacted operations? Kacal: “Right now our staff is numbering about 320. It used to be around 350 but we’re seeing some reduction in demand for janitorial staff because of empty buildings from the pandemic. From a technology standpoint, it was not very difficult for our Head Office staff to work from home when COVID came because we had been preparing the organization for virtual working