Over the last 24 hours we have been working with a number of our key customers who have replied, informing us of their ‘Essential Service’ provider status, and asserting that our services formally play an essential part of their service delivery. As such we are now deemed to be part of the supply chain for Essential Service providers, and are also therefore now considered an Essential Service provider ourselves.
All of our staff are working full-time from our home locations, and for the most part we do not believe we will need to move around, or operate from our office location in order to continue to deliver those services.
We have already been making all reasonable preparations to ensure continuous delivery of our services, but with this new determination and with formal responses from these key customers, we have been empowered to notify our up-stream service providers of our change in status.
We would likely only need to invoke special privileges (of movement and of staff placement into facilities), in the event of any service failure, where we would need to put staff on-site to assist with hands-on diagnosis of faults, to remedy and rectify such a fault.
That is where our focus has been placed – we are in the process of notifying, and assessing the ability of, our providers who:
- Provide access to our co-located equipment
- Provide connectivity and network services, and associated power and co-location
- Provide hardware service and support, including replacement units under service warranty
This is ongoing work, but so far we have received positive responses from our providers as we are commonly not the only Essential Service provider which they have had to deal with.
It should be noted that we have also been working with MBIE around confusing and conflicting statements on their COVID19.govt.nz website – relating to the provision of services by a company who delivers both essential and non-essential services. Currently their site expresses a misleading expectation that those with mixed collections of essential and non-essential services must not deliver non-essential services. We have received confirmation directly from the MBIE helpline that in cases like ours, the intention was not to restrict the delivery of non-essential services if they do not create a situation where staff would be required to continue to be on-site. The wording of their current advice was geared more towards a ‘productive industry’ such as a factory which creates both essential and non-essential goods. They do not want staff continuing to be required to travel to a factory for the production of those non-essential goods. Their wording is NOT YET clear enough to be able to distinguish, for service sector industries like ours, where there is no expectation or requirement for staff to be on-premises for either Essential or Non-essential services.
If we were to need to respond in the manner outlined above, such a critical service failure would affect both our Essential and Non-essential services equally. To be clear, we would be mobilising limited, and key staff members *for the benefit of the Essential Services*, but that the benefit delivered to those services would also have a positive by-product effect of delivering greater uptime, also for those Non-essential services, since they are all serviced using the same equipment and services.
The delivery of Non-essential services alongside those Essential Services does not, in any way, impact or create any increased level of risk to our delivery of Essential Services. From our perspective, we will be equally aware of any issues which might affect either group of services, and they continue to be monitored and managed ‘as-one’.
If this situation changes, then we will be capable of segregating our services into groups, but it is not our intention to do so at this point in time.
Any questions or issues, then please contact Chris W, General Manager – Enigma Solutions Ltd.
Thank you. Stay safe, stay well.