Our mission, and everyday commitment, at Tradeshift is to create economic opportunity for all by connecting every company in the world. These days, as the world is dealing with an unprecedented pandemic health scare in COVID-19 (coronavirus), it’s clear that global trade and supply chains are facing challenges that make our commitment more important than ever.
Therefore, I’d like to take this opportunity to share with you some of the measures we have been, and are, taking to ensure that our valued customers, partners, suppliers, and communities continue to be fully supported by and can count on Tradeshift’s continued operations and business continuity.
As a company that operates globally with employees in more than 18 countries, we want to do our part to help reduce the risk of spreading the virus and to minimize the potential effects on our team members and their families. As a result, we proactively introduced new global policies on March 6, 2020. We temporarily closed all our physical offices for 3 weeks, and we have asked all global employees to work from home. Additionally, we have restricted all travel including any domestic/regional travel until further notice. This is a fast-changing situation and we will continue to monitor developments and official guidelines, adjusting accordingly.
Tradeshift is a cloud software business and, as such, we are able to access our systems and tools from anywhere, and the delivery of our services is not directly reliant on physical supply chains that could be impacted by factory closings, transportation concerns, or similar disruptions. Our teams are globally dispersed, providing built-in resilience to a situation like this. We are replacing in-person meetings and events with digital ones and promoting ongoing, company-wide discussions to share best practices for working in a fully distributed mode.
As part of our strategy for maintaining a resilient organization, the Tradeshift IT and back-office infrastructure is built using best-of-breed SaaS-based solutions and as such, our offices are used as collaborative working spaces rather than technology hubs for the organization. The Tradeshift platform itself is built on Amazon Web Services, which provides multi-region redundancy and is managed remotely by Tradeshift engineers distributed around the globe.
We are also taking advantage of existing relationships and resources at our disposal, and I’m personally actively participating in the WHO/WEF Pandemic Task Force for Business that was just created to ensure global supply chains and pursue collaborations to address business and economic disruptions.
Finally, Tradeshift is in a unique position to inject financial liquidity for our customers and their supply chains to mitigate this pandemic’s impact. Using Tradeshift Engage and Tradeshift Cash, enterprise customers can free up their working capital in weeks. Sellers on Tradeshift can also access early payments for invoices submitted via Tradeshift in as little as two days. To accelerate economic recovery in the Tradeshift ecosystem, we will run the Tradeshift Cash program for suppliers as close to cost as possible for the next 3 months.
We are doing our very best to provide support to both the global and Tradeshift communities in an unprecedented situation. I want to thank you for working with Tradeshift and for your continued understanding and partnership - and your help in keeping everyone safe.
Regards,
Christian Lanng
CEO & Co-Founder, Tradeshift
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