It's 'snow' joke for SMEs

While it may be pretty to look out at a snow covered landscape, it’s ‘snow’ laughing matter for SME’s struggling to continue trading during a cold snap. According to a YouGov poll, 58% of senior decision-makers at small businesses said their companies suffered as a result of the snow last winter, despite 78% believing their firms were sufficiently prepared.

South Yorkshire based IT solutions and software house Pinnula is one company not affected by this statistic, nor their customers.

Steven Kay, Managing Director comments: “Staff safety is a high priority during bouts of bad weather and the ability to work from home is essential to any business wishing to continue trading and provide a high standard of service. A quarter of staff nationally, failed to get into work at all during the last period of bad weather but for Pinnula that was not an issue. Our staff has the ability to work remotely from home, having access to our systems and Uniplan, our flagship ERP software package which holds all our customer and supplier details.

"When your client base covers the whole of the UK, the transferring of the IT support desk telephone number meant that we could continue to service our customers that were not affected by the snow effortlessly. This is a service which we offer to our customers, remotely hosting their IT networks keeping their business records accessible and open to trade.

"Disaster recovery is another service we provide to our customers which is often overlooked by SME’s. Research has shown that large organisations invest in disaster recovery/business continuity plans and spend considerably more time and planning for such an event whereby SME’s tend to look into it after they have encountered a ‘disaster’. Our customers have peace of mind that their IT will be back up and running with minimal impact to their business and therefore able to concentrate their time and efforts elsewhere during such critical times. ”