All our professional and private lives are currently subjected to a lot of uncertainty. Managing uncertainty is challenging and stressful and, with this communication, we would like to remove uncertainties you may have around Swiss-AS and AMOS in these challenging times.
Over the last few weeks, around 95% of Swiss-AS employees work from home office. Our priority has been to maintain our support and off-site services at the customary pre Covid-19 quality levels, while still ensuring the safety of our staff and adherence to government rules and recommendations. On-going AMOS implementation projects are now supported remotely thanks to a lot of creativity, strong will and exemplary dedication on both sides to make continuous progress.
Many customers have placed projects on hold, as a result Swiss-AS now face a substantial drop in the customer demand for services. Software selection processes of potentially new customers are equally impacted by the crisis and a significantly lower number of new contract signatures is expected. This in turn leads to a further reduction in the demand for services and has a considerable impact on our overall cash flow.
In order to partially alleviate the impact of this understandable decrease in service needs, Swiss-AS has decided to place a certain number of staff members onto short-time work. Employee profiles working on the product are fully excluded from this measure and staff working short time can return to a regular work schedule within a day’s notice. In addition, a very tight cost and cash management control process has been in place since several weeks in order secure our financial stability.
These measures will not restrict AMOS product development nor our ability to deliver the established support service levels, including AOS and Hosting. An IT System like AMOS, which enables customers to exploit opportunities (e.g. efficiency gains, cost reductions) or address threats (e.g. low value stream integration, poor data quality preventing data based decision making), is a critical resource that can provide a competitive advantage during and after the Covid-19 crisis. Despite some staff being on short-time work, Swiss-AS also retains the ability to deliver added value services, even on short notice, to support customers in ensuring that the full potential of AMOS can be exploited
Work on the architecture upgrade announced in November 2019 is still fully prioritised as this provides the baseline for strategic product enhancements, like AMOSmobile/STORES using a new front-end technology stack and the AMOSmobile off-line capability announced for mid-2021. Development on AMOScentral continues as well and for stable release 20.12 we still aim to deliver a good number of customer initiated change requests, the AMOS chip assignments help us in the scoping process.
We would like to reassure you that, while we address short-term challenges in these uncertain times, Swiss-AS is not losing focus on our long-term initiatives. These will further enhance the product and our ability to support you in adopting it well. Eventually enabling you to address existing and the new upcoming challenges of the post Covid-19 crisis.
In the meantime, we remain fully available to support you in your day-to-day work with AMOS.