CIANJ Commerce Magazine September 2020 Live | Page 50

■ Annual Best Practices Guide
Continued From Page 46
HOSPITALITY AND ENTERTAINMENT
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Blue Moon Mexican Cafés,
Englewood and Wyckoff,
and Bronxville, New York
By Howard Felixbrod,
Owner and Founder
COVID‐19 has been a challenging
time for the restaurant
business. Thankfully, we have a robust
delivery and take-out business at all of our
Blue Moon restaurants. We quickly adapted
and created family meals for four and for
six with an approachable price. To me, it was
more important to be a resource of assistance
for our customers. Our motto is “Life is a Fiesta,”
and we knew the importance of keeping
the fun going for the kids and came up with a
“Birthday Party to Go,” which includes food,
party hats and everything fun for the family
to celebrate. During the crisis, we made it our
mission to feed those on the front lines and
donated many free meals and then created
a “Go Fund Me Page” specifically for Meals
for Heroes—those who are on the front lines
dealing with the pandemic, feeding firemen,
police, EMTs and healthcare workers.
New Jersey Performing
Arts Center (NJPAC)
By Dave Rodriguez,
Executive Producer
We’ve chosen to delay reopening,
as necessary, to ensure the
safety of our audiences, artists
and staff. While the Arts Center’s physical
campus remains closed, our virtual offerings
continue to excite audiences at home with our
diverse, virtual online programming featuring
performances by Savion Glover, Alvin Ailey,
American Song, Chick Corea and more. We
even have a weekly DJ Dance party in addition
to free live dance workshops, yoga classes,
community conversations and performer interviews.
We’ve also been working with agents
in being one of the first performing arts centers
to offer paid virtual programming. We
recently presented Max Major, Virtual Game
Night and comedian Piff–The Magic Dragon:
Live From Las Vegas. NJPAC has always
been community-driven and we continue to
be so through the pandemic by welcoming
hundreds virtually to our Business Partners
Roundtable events, where leaders and business
executives discuss the issues most important
to them.
Decusoft
By Bob Laurenzo,
CEO
COVID‐19 has forced us to
reinvent the proven customer
onboarding process we have
used for 18 years. We had to
modify our long-standing implementation
methodologies because our employees and
customers are working remotely. We took
simple steps by extending our collaboration
tools (web conferencing and chat), modified
our project methodology from two to three
day, full day, in-person meetings to smaller
more “agile” type virtual meetings, while providing
a central repository to our customers
to review and track documentation and data.
Initial customer feedback indicates the process
is more streamlined and enables them to
be more focused on shorter, more productive,
easily scheduled sessions. These modifications
have saved us time and allowed us to achieve
greater efficiencies for both our customers
and employees—ultimately leading to a better
user experience for everyone.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
eMazzanti Technologies
By Carl Mazzanti,
President and Co-Founder
COVID‐19 presented an opportunity
to hone eMazzanti
Technologies services and use
the leadership time to add a
technology practice for Enterprise Resource
Planning. Our customers recognize the need
for the increased agility that ERP provides, required
by the current business environment,
and thus are responding well to the offering.
The combination of better service and the addition
of this new offering to our customers
not only kept us going but put us back on
target for near triple-digit growth for the second
half of 2020. The referrals, positive online
reviews and customer case study submissions
from our customers are at an all-time high.
During these times, your ability to help those
you service achieve their goals will help you
achieve your own.
48 COMMERCE www. commercemagnj.com
Integrated Business
Systems
By Michael Mullin,
President
For IBS, as a managed IT service
provider, the COVID‐19
shutdown meant helping our
clients transition more than 750 employees
to remote work status—abruptly and rapidly.
This included ensuring their team members
had proper devices, systems and security to
do their jobs. Today, companies continue
to prioritize keeping their people safe and
healthy with fully or partially remote operations
and virtual teams—and many also are
seeing the possibility that the pandemic has
forever changed the nature of the workplace.
Regardless of time and circumstance, employees,
contractors and partners who have
the right tools to work from home—or anywhere
else—can operate efficiently and effectively.
And with everyone staying connected,
working remotely does not mean working in
isolation. The takeaway? Providing business
management solutions that support secure
and seamless mobile and telework scenarios is
an IBS best practice that will far outlast this
challenging moment in time.
IT Radix
By Cathy Coloff,
Founder and Owner
IT Radix has grown by putting
clients first. As we’ve grown,
keeping everyone in sync has
been vital. COVID‐19 has
made this more challenging and even more
critical. Prior to March, we enjoyed weekly
internal team huddles in person—since then
they have been virtual and have increased to
twice weekly. We have used Microsoft Teams
for instant messaging communications for
years, but now we leverage Teams for not
only ourselves but also our clients, taking
advantage of the face-to-face benefits of video,
voice calls and quick check-ins. Fostering
our ever-present positive outlook and staff
morale has been augmented by internal “improvisational”
meeting groups that include
those with overlapping or interlinking job
responsibilities. Allocating the time and space
for staff to discuss “anything at all” in this way
has proven to be a big win for IT Radix and
our clients.
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