Basic Steps to your first Business Continuity Management

Managing a business can be challenging and exciting especially in Africa. Everyday comes different bringing in challenges from customers, the government, competition and the environment. Knowing this, there are some events you cannot plan for, or can you?

As businesses are now even more reliant on information technology, specialist plants and suppliers which, when they fail, cause disruption to the business. Even if not destroyed access to the business may be restricted by gas leak preventing normal business operations.

Some questions to ask your organization are:

·      What would we do if you lost access to your primary premises, plant and machinery through flood or fire?

·      How would we cope if your IT or telecommunication systems fail?

·      Where would we get alternative supplies if your key supplier closed up shop?

·      How would we cope with loss of key staff and high levels of absenteeism?

Disruption can happen anytime, how well you deal with the effects to your business may determine your future.

The introduction of Business Continuity Management (BCM) to your organization will help you prepare and mitigate against major disruptions your organization may face. BCM has been employed by large businesses around the world to enable them cope with major disruptions. The techniques employed can be scaled to any size business in any sector.

There are five steps to an effective BCM process:

Stage 1 – Understanding your Business

The first stage is to understand how and what you need to make your business work and who has an interest in how well you perform.

·      Do you know who your stakeholders are- these are those who have interest in the business?

o   These will include your customers, employees, sub contractors, suppliers, banks, investors, insurers and auditors

·      Why do you need to identify them?

o   At the time of a major disruption these stakeholders will want to know how soon you will be back in business and what the effect of your disruption will be on their operations and investments.

·      Do you know which of your activities are most critical and if you could not continue them for any reason what would have the greatest impact on your business?

o   The impact may not initially be financial; it may be your reputation that is damaged, which in turn could cause new business to be reduced.

·      Consider how soon the disruption will impact your business; some activities can have immediate effect. Knowing this will help you prioritize activities that need to be restored

·      Do you know what you need to undertake these activities?

o   Identify the people and skills involved, what computer, software and data you require

o   Are there key drawings and specification that you need access to?

o   What communication do you need, both fixed and mobile

·      Who are your key suppliers

o   A failure by supplier may have serious consequences for you, preventing you delivering to your customers. The customers will hold you responsible, not your supplier.

Stage 2 – Business Continuity Management strategies

The next stage is to determine how you will restore the critical activities. In the initial stage you will have identified what you need to get up running first and what resources you need. There are several choices that you can make at this point.

The activity may be seen as so important that you may decide to provide a duplicate to avoid the failure occurring, eg find a second supplier for that critical product; back-up critical data off site. Alternatively you may decide that you will provide a partial level of service, perhaps to your most important customers, within a specified timescale, restoring full service as and when you are able.

Finally you may decide to do nothing in the short term, waiting until full business recovery has been completed.

Any strategy must recognise the internal and external dependencies of the organisation and must have general acceptance by management functions involved.

Stage 3 - Developing and implementing a business continuity management response

Having decided what it is you need to restore and how soon you will do this, create the business continuity plans that will enable you to quickly recover what is critical to your business.

The business continuity plan is at the heart of the business continuity management process and sets out what is to be done, who will do it and how to contact them in an emergency, where you will work from if the normal business location is unavailable, key suppliers for the essential services you need and where the critical data is stored. The plan will also detail who should be informed about the disruption.

The structure, content and detail of the plan will depend on the nature of the organisation and the risk and environment in which it operates. In particularly large or complex organisations, it may be necessary to have departmental plans, of which you may integrate into one high-level plan.

Stage 4 - Building and embedding a business continuity management culture

Documenting the business continuity plan is one element of developing a business continuity management strategy. Its success, however, depends upon implementation of the recommendations made across the entire organisation; a programme of training for those directly involved in the execution of the plan; and an education and awareness programme to ensure understanding and adoption of the plan in relevant parts of the organisation - this applies to both staff and suppliers.

All stakeholders should be informed that you have introduced business continuity management and what to expect if your business suffers a disruption, as this may give you a competitive advantage over others and customers will have more confidence in your reliability. It may even pre-empt their own demands for you to install business continuity management as part of future contracts.

Stage 5 - Maintaining and auditing business continuity management

Business continuity management does not end when the plans are written. They must be tested to see if they will work when you really need them. It is too late to find out the errors and omissions when you have to use the plan in earnest. Plans must be kept up to date as the business structure, suppliers and customers may change, as may contact details for key employees.

Be prepared to deal with any disruption, whether large or small, public or private, that would prevent you from satisfying your customers needs. Considering a BCM plan? Talk to Artco solutions on enquiry@artcosolutions.com or visit us on www.artcosolution.com