The goal of a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is to minimize the adverse consequences of a business disaster down to acceptable levels for a business. Outside the acceptable levels, the business will experience too much pain to function or may not even survive. While Disaster Recovery Planning works from the day of disaster to stabilization, BCP plans out the phase from disaster stabilization forward to eventually attaining pre-disaster revenue (normal revenue). This plan helps to ensure that a company takes the needed steps to get back to operating at peak performance levels in the marketplace.
At Fortify Risk Management, we partner with your team to extend your disaster recovery plan (which helps you stabilize operations after a disaster) to include detailed and planned-out steps to build back to pre-disaster levels. These steps include: Risk Management (threat assessment), Business Impact Analysis, Plan Strategy Development, Plan Design, Testing, and Maintenance of the plan.
While building these plans, it is critical to have complete Sr. Management buy-in and support. It is an investment in the future sustainability of the business, the future protection of corporate assets, and the future protection of the salaries for your executives and employees. Behind these assets and salaries are real-life personal dreams of families and financial goals of individuals. Communities rely on solid and stable corporate partners.
For example, at a high-level, here is what a plan design could look like. Let’s say you identify a threat to the business: The loss of a major supplier. This loss could come from a variety of disasters for them, but let’s focus for this example on a plant fire. We would first build a team with our consultants and members of your corporate leadership to tackle this BCP. We would then determine the “worst case scenario” loss this would create for The Company. We would restart and complete this process for every major business threat the organization faces.
Next, our integrated team determines the business impact these threats (which create a disaster) would have on The Company. How will it impact your clients, your inventory, your employees, or your equipment utilization, etc.? How will a lack of fulfillment of orders hurt your reputation in the marketplace, your long-term contracts due to lack of client loyalty, etc.? Will you need to reduce staff? How will this impact your ability to hire qualified staff down the road? We may dig into the weather and geographical conditions present at this supplier site. We also may request their disaster recovery/business continuity plan documents, to determine their own site response and alternative sourcing options.
Once we answer questions like the above threat assessment and business impact questions, we would work with your team to map out and document a strategy for this plan. This would then lead us to design the plan with various recovery options to allow us to sustainably continue operations. Typically, this would be as quickly as possible, to minimize downtime; but in certain situations, or at certain stages, we may decide that it is more important to save capital.
We would test the plan, with multiple testing vehicles, to determine if it is not just good on paper, but it is vetted for a disaster as much as possible. And finally, we must maintain the plan each year to adapt and adjust to marketplace conditions.
This is a high-level assessment of how a business continuity planning process works. And it is an asset for company to have because it drives healthy, proactive decision-making during a business disaster to help them recover effectively and with intelligence.
