Dec. 28, 2020 – 2020 has been a tough year as the Global pandemic interrupted the ‘normal’ ways of doing business. The impact on people’s lives will be felt long into the future. This year has highlighted how much we rely and take for granted our connections with friends and colleagues.
Something that stood out for me is the importance of frontline workers. The healthcare workers have been the vanguard in this pandemic by risking their own lives and the lives of their families to care for the vulnerable. We owe an eternal debt of gratitude to these heroes.
Besides the healthcare workers, in our industry, I have witnessed the heroic efforts of the people in the transit space, the men and women that operate the trains and buses and maintenance workers that keep them moving. Their efforts cannot be discounted as without their contribution in keeping transit operations smooth, frontline workers would not have been able to come to our aid the way they did.
I have spent some time in the last weeks thinking about our business and how this pandemic has impacted our 2020. When all this hit, we revised our goals and pivoted to a different way of operating. This helped us redirect our efforts and stay focused in this trying year. In a lot of ways, I think as a company we were lucky, we were fortunate enough to have projects to deliver and we had defined goals for added functionality for our existing portfolio.
For TekTracking, I’ll summarize year 2020 as: making progress despite delays.
Delays:
Transit agencies delayed or postponed several projects as a result of the pandemic, mostly because of concerns over funding or concern about the safety of execution. The projects that went ahead did so with severe restrictions and necessary precautions. We saw some delays or slow downs with freight projects, but these tended to move forward as the year went on. As a company we also learned to adapt to remote implementation work and while this was certainly slower we managed to get through some key milestones on important projects
Progress:
Despite the challenges thrown in our way, we have made a lot of progress as a company. A large percentage of our goals for 2020 were centered around product completion, rounding out our TIMPS offering and finalizing the production of Safety Light Monitor (which we were able to deliver to a Class 1 this year). In general, we made a lot of progress in making our offerings much more robust by implementing the lessons learned in previous years. Our team did a wonderful job of working with our existing clients to realize their vision for our product lines.
In summary, the message I take away from 2020 is a hopeful one, scientists and healthcare professionals have successfully developed vaccines in a record time. I am confident that their hard work in achieving this milestone will return us to some sort of normality as we head into 2021. As a business we continue to focus on our goals, developing new and unique technologies that support advanced safety and productivity to this great industry.
