Whitespace Whitepaper

Building Resilience for a Sustainable Future - Mangrove Pilot Program Stage 1

Executive Summary

In today's volatile business environment, operational resilience is no longer a luxury but a necessity for survival and growth. Unexpected disruptions and preventable operational failures are significant contributors to business failures, often exacerbated by the resulting financial losses and reputational damage. To address these challenges, Mangrove has developed the Whitespace Pilot Program. A comprehensive approach designed to empower businesses to become more resilient, by building businesses that bend and not break.

Leveraging cutting-edge technologies such as a digital twin, advanced analytics, and an interactive co-pilot, the Whitespace Pilot Program provides businesses with invaluable insights, data-driven decision-making capabilities, and proactive risk management strategies. Through a three-stage process, participants are guided towards a more resilient future, enabling them to navigate challenges with confidence.

What is Operational Resilience?

Operational resilience is a strategic approach that equips businesses to withstand disruptions and thrive in ever-changing environments. In the same way, a skyscraper needs to be built with a strong foundation, a business without a solid base, no matter how impressive the structure is will be vulnerable to collapse. Operational resilience looks to ensure the continuity of critical business functions in the face of disruptions, whether they are internal or external. It's about building a robust foundation that can withstand shocks and continue to operate effectively, even under challenging circumstances.

The risks and rewards in today's business world are more significant than ever before. The failure rate for startups is alarming, with nearly a quarter failing within their first year and half within five. This stark reality underscores the need for businesses to be resilient and adaptable.

While growth and innovation are crucial, they cannot be achieved at the expense of a strong foundation. Internal processes are the often-overlooked backbone of a successful business. Just as a complex recipe relies on each ingredient for a successful outcome, businesses depend on their internal processes to function effectively.

Identifying and understanding the critical components of a business can be a daunting task, especially for resource-constrained startups. Traditional methods, such as hiring expensive consultants or implementing complex software, may not be feasible for many.

Mangrove offers a practical approach that helps businesses identify and strengthen their core components, especially for resource-constrained startups. The Mangrove Framework, which has been built into a three-stage pilot program, provides clear guidance and support to build resilience and navigate challenges effectively."

Understanding the Mangrove's Whitespace Pilot Program

Mangrove offers a unique opportunity for startups to participate in the Whitespace Pilot Program. This program provides a three-stage approach to building business resilience. For this paper, Stage 1 will be the primary focus:

• Stage 1: Digital Twin Creation - In this stage, we create a detailed digital replica of your business, capturing its complex components and process flows. It is a virtual mirror image of your real-world operations. Provided through a visual map, it shows your business's inner workings within the platform. By simulating the business environment the platform can analyse the digital twin for potential outcomes, identify critical components, pinpoint potential weaknesses, and uncover opportunities for optimisation.

• Stage 2: Advanced Analytics - By applying advanced analytics to the data collected from the digital twin, we can uncover hidden patterns, trends, and correlations that may not be immediately apparent. This stage empowers businesses with actionable insights, enabling them to make data-driven decisions for growth and continuous improvement.

• Stage 3: Co-pilot Guidance - An interactive Co-pilot acts as a virtual advisor, providing real-time recommendations based on the unique needs of the businesses. These recommendations are based on the valuable insights gained from the digital twin and advanced analytics.

Benefits of the Whitespace Pilot Program

• Building a digital twin with clear visualisations

• Gain valuable insights into business resilience

• Develop data-driven strategies for optimisation and growth

• Receive expert guidance from Mangrove's founding team

• Access to cutting-edge SaaS technology for building resilience

Research Background and Focus Outcomes

The Whitespace Pilot Program is a comprehensive research initiative designed to empower startups in building more resilient businesses. Mangrove does this by guiding startups through a three-stage process. The program aims to increase transparency, prioritise critical components, highlight interconnections and vulnerabilities and provide a visual business inventory.

The first stage of the program focuses on preparing business data in a simplified manner to facilitate subsequent prioritisation, analysis and action. This involves providing startups with clear, concise, simple resources to understand the concepts of resilience and business transparency. These resources are delivered in the form of a software platform. The software consists of guided workflows and questionnaires that collect business data. By simplifying the process, the program aims to ensure that startups can effectively grasp the information and apply it to their businesses.

Through this stage, the program seeks to gauge the level of understanding startups have of resilience and business transparency. We do this by measuring the increase in users' maturity regarding resilience practices and overall business understanding. By documenting these changes, the program can assess the effectiveness of the provided resources and tools in improving startups' knowledge and capabilities. Furthermore, the program observes the shift in how startups leverage new, easily accessible business data to solve problems. By analysing these changes in mindset, the program can assess the impact of data-driven approaches on startups' decision-making processes.

Through this research, the program expects to achieve a variety of outcomes. First, startups will develop a deeper understanding of their business components and their interconnectedness. By increasing their understanding of operations and improving operational transparency more informed decision-making can take place, alongside easier identification of operational improvements. By adopting a data-driven approach, startups can make more informed decisions, navigate challenges with greater agility, and capitalise on opportunities. This will help them avoid costly mistakes and achieve sustainable growth.

Finally, the program aims to uncover valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities startups face in building resilience. These insights can inform future research and initiatives designed to support startups in their growth and development.

The key questions we aim to answer are:

• How well do startups understand the concepts of resilience and business transparency?

• Are the provided resources and tools sufficiently simplified to make a meaningful impact?

• What is the increase in users' maturity regarding resilience practices and overall business understanding?

• How does the mindset shift in solving business problems using new, easily digestible business data?

These questions focus on understanding the effectiveness of the Whitespace Pilot Program in improving startups' knowledge, capabilities, and decision-making processes.

Understanding from Stage 1

This white paper presents a case program based on users' experience with the Whitespace Pilot Program. The program highlights the following key takeaways from participants:

Key Findings

1. Understanding of Digital Twins

• Initially, some participants found the concept of a digital twin in a business context challenging to grasp. However, a simplified tool that guided the building process, combined with a visual representation of the final output, proved invaluable in clarifying the concept.

• Unlike many tools that simply collect data, the visual representation provided by the program provided a tangible way to understand and interact with the collected information. This visual aid was instrumental in helping startup’s achieve their "aha moments," where they gained a clearer picture of their actual operations compared to their perceived reality.

• The process of creating the digital twin was found to be clear and manageable, thanks to the guided workflows and visual nature of the platform.

• All participants gained a clear understanding of how a digital twin produced a visual representation of their business's inner workings.

• The way that the visual maps linked and outlined the flow of end-to-end customer journeys and all the components required to deliver them was beneficial. Prior to this process most companies did not have any end-to-end mapping with prioritised and risk assessed components.

2. Value of Digital Twin Creation

• The process of creating a digital twin provided participants with a comprehensive understanding of their business's interconnectedness.

• Prior to the digital twin being created many businesses were unaware of all their business elements, these were not captured or categorised. This process provided users with a guided approach to simplifying the collection and classification of their business teams, assets, workflows, and services.

• The digital twin highlighted in a clear way how business elements are connected. Prior to the creation, all participants did not have any business mapping. This proved useful for many participants because it highlighted areas for improvement and potential redundancies within the business.

• The visual representation of assets, workflows, and teams facilitated a clearer understanding of their relationships within the business and business dependencies. Most of these were not fully understood or considered by participants prior to participation.

• The capacity of the digital twin to highlight critical components and potential vulnerabilities was one of the most favoured benefits.

3. Benefits of the Resilience Score

• Participants found the resilience score to be helpful in identifying critical components within their business. By having the risk assessment built into the collection process, and an automatic resilience score generated upon submission, the prioritisation of components was simplified. This score then enabled business components to be prioritised based on logical reasoning.

• The score helped prioritise assets based on their importance and potential impact on operations, quickly allowing participants to identify high-impact components for focus. This, along with a clear and ranked visual inventory, provided valuable insights.

• When assessing the dependency and service resilience maps participants noted that the resilience score on each component quickly enables the identification of high-impact components within the maps.

• Understanding the resilience score enabled participants to focus on risk mitigation and ensure proper management of critical assets. This has simplified effective risk management for participants who previously did not have any risk management controls in place.

4. Overall Satisfaction with Stage 1

• Participants expressed overall satisfaction with Stage 1, rating the time invested against outcomes as a positive experience. This positive feedback is a promising indicator for the continued success of the pilot program and its potential to deliver significant benefits in the resilience space.

• Participants expressed appreciation for the valuable insights gained from the digital twin and its potential for improving their business.

• Overall participants noted that their business comprehension had increased as they built their digital twin. It provided them with greater transparency of their operations and a more holistic way to think about impacts on their operations.

The research outcomes from the participants experience with Stage 1 demonstrate the effectiveness of the program's approach to building business resilience. The digital twin proved to be a valuable tool for understanding business operations, identifying critical components, and prioritising risk mitigation efforts. The resilience score provided a quantitative measure for assessing the importance of business components and provides a positive impact for guiding decision-making. Overall, the participant's experience highlights the potential benefits of the Whitespace Pilot Program for startups seeking to enhance their operational resilience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Stage 1 proved to be a comprehensive research initiative that successfully enabled participants to build better resilience practices. This was achieved by providing a user-friendly tool equipped with the necessary resources to understand and build resilience and business transparency. The programs successfully improved participants’ understanding, maturity, and decision-making capabilities. This Whitespace Pilot Program can contribute to a better understanding of the challenges and opportunities faced by startups and inform future initiatives aimed at supporting growth and development in this space.

Mangrove will be running Stage 2, with the participating startups and will publish a subsequent paper on the learnings from the Advanced Analytics. This stage will leverage advanced analytics on the captured data. The outcomes will allow for the identification of hidden patterns, trends, and correlations that might not be readily apparent from the digital twin creation. This stage will empower participants with actionable insights and data-driven strategies for growth and improvement in business transparency.

Mangrove will be running a second cohort for those startups and investors who missed out on the initial cohort of the Whitespace Pilot Program. If you want to unlock the potential for building future-proof businesses. Sign up today!