Oasis Engineering
March 2020 and Oasis Engineering Ltd, Tauranga, had an important decision to make. The same decision made by thousands of other kiwi companies – do they choose Zoom, MS Teams, Webex or one of the many other platforms available to help the company try to keep operating during Level 4 Lockdown.
With no time to think MS Teams was chosen, but Oasis had an ace up their sleeve in the form of a young, dynamic engineering team and they took to Lockdown like a duck to water and eat new software platforms for breakfast!
In May 2020 when they returned to the office, MS Teams was an integral part of the day to day life at Oasis. A suggestion that they return to the face to face toolbox meeting was immediately rejected and even now the daily standups are conducted on MS Teams. Other cloud-based systems like Trello have also been embraced and more and more paper-based processes are going into the cloud.
COVID presented an opportunity that Oasis was not going to waste. In times of uncertainty, people are more acceptable to change and continuous improvement was driven hard. When COVID is finally over, Oasis will be a leaner, stronger organisation, in a position to be able to capitalise on whatever opportunities present themselves.
Kevin Flint, GM of Oasis Engineering shared some words of wisdom on how he saw the impacts of COVID. “In 2019 I had a busier-than-usual travel itinerary. I was starting to get weary of all the travel and was looking forward to a quieter 2020 – Be careful what you wish for!!”
