VIVIENNE OJALA BROCK SOLUTIONS Brock Solutions is a global industrial automation, engineering software, and professional services company with industry expertise in Manufacturing, Transportation, and Utilities. Our solutions empower customers to access data, transform operations, and drive performance and efficiency, while reducing costs and risk. WBE Canada: What challenges have you faced during the pandemic in terms of operations? Vivienne: Undoubtedly, the global pandemic was one of the biggest obstacles we experienced over the last couple of years. The majority of our projects require our employees to travel all over North America, and in many cases overseas as well, so there has been no shortage of obstacles and challenges navigating through this very complicated ordeal including Covid-19 testing, supply chain issues, food shortages, travel restrictions and vaccination status. With tremendous cooperation and support from our employees, we navigated through such
obstacles by having people temporarily move to some of our site locations instead of travelling back and forth, and building up teams that work extremely well together and support each other to contribute to the success of our projects with a continued focus on customers’ wants and needs. In addition to this, we helped our customers navigate through their own financial challenges, and various operational obstacles by working with them from a financial perspective, and offering options of delayed payment terms, lowering costs wherever possible, and being patient and understanding of their own business challenges that resulted from the pandemic. WBE Canada: How has WBE certification helped in your securing international contracts, especially with government funded projects? Vivienne: We have many active government contracts in primarily US jurisdictions via other WBE Certifications. As part of our broader WBE certifications, WBE Canada certification has benefited our business by offering credibility with large private and government organizations in Canada and validating the diversity mandate that exists within these respective organizations.
These women leveraged their resources and relationships to accommodate the changing landscape commerce and breaking into the realm of globalization. Their common goal was similar: growth. WBE Canada’s Toolbox offers the tools and resources needed to help women-owned businesses scale up and grow their business with a primary focus to help WBEs understand supply chains, and helps businesses maximize certification, navigate supplier diversity events and opportunities and get their businesses ready for large contracts. Learn more about WBE Certification and how to get access to the toolbox. Our team is here to give you the answers you need, reach out to us at certification@wbecanada.ca
WBE Canada Magazine | Issue 5 | March 2022
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