Could your business survive a supply chain interruption?

Businesses of all sizes have a supply chain that they rely on for the successful continuation of their business. For some companies, the supply chain keeps their production line operating by providing just in time delivery of component parts, pick-up of finished parts and off-site storage or parts and materials. For others, their supply chain may not be as obvious to the business. For companies that rely on partners or other businesses to provide information or deliverables that the company uses to produce the final design or report, these providers are part of the company’s supply chain.

Does your company outsource the provisioning of services, such as finance, Human Resources or auditing? These could also be considered part of your supply chain. Some of the companies providing these services may be smaller and less resilient to a disruption to their business.

In order to manage the risks to your company from your supply chain, you need to understand your organization’s activities and processes.

· The critical functions and activities should be identified.

· The impact to the company that a loss of a supplier may have.

· The risks that could impact the supplier.

Once all of this information has been gathered, then you can start to mitigate the risks to your business that could occur due to a supply chain problem.

The loss of a supplier is a major risk today as more business functions are outsourced. It is necessary to validate the supplier’s recovery capability before committing all of your activities to any one supplier.

Preparing for disaster – could Canadian businesses be legislated to develop Business Continuity Plans?

In today’s corporate world with its associated risks and potential problems to a businesses survival, there is very little legislation that relates back to companies having a business continuity program in place.

In other countries around the world, legislators are moving to impose rules and regulations that would mean that companies would have to develop and implement business continuity programs. These future rules and regulations would be based on existing standards such as the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 1600 and others.

The NFPA 1600 standards define business continuity as “an ongoing process supported by senior management and funded to ensure that the necessary steps are taken to identify the impact of potential losses, maintain viable recovery strategies and recovery plans, and ensure continuity of services through personnel training, plan testing and maintenance.”

The United States House of Representatives presented a bill in August 2007 that was signed into law that encourages the use of business continuity and disaster recovery standards for the private sector. This law specifically cites the NFPA 1600 code.

Will Canadian legislators follow suite? If they don’t will any Canadian company doing business with the US be required to show that they have a business continuity plan in place? I don’t know, but I do believe that if the US and other countries governments are moving in this direction, it may be of benefit for Canadian companies to begin planning and developing their business continuity plans now to stay ahead of the curve.

An article at http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/01/16/disaster-preparedness-companies-oped-cx_slw_0117disaster.html talks about this in a bit more detail.

Cold and flu season – social distancing and sneeze etiquette

With the cold and flu season now in full swing, is your company using social distancing techniques and introducing cough and sneeze etiquette into the workplace to help ensure that the impact to your staff is minimized?

By implementing these two methods of controlling the spread of flu viruses and cold germs now, your staff will be aware of these methods and will be comfortable with their use within your company. This knowledge will mean that should an Influenza Pandemic occur and the World Health Organization (WHO) raises their alert level to stage 4; it will be to your companies benefit if social distancing and sneeze and cough etiquette can be implemented quickly and efficiently.

For an article on Social Distancing you can go to:

http://www.chacocanyon.com/pointlookout/060510.shtml

For information on Cough and Sneeze Etiquette see:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/covercough.htm

Making the Most of the BIA

The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is a very critical part of the development of a Business Continuity Program (BCP) for any size company, but many companies either do not conduct a BIA or conduct an incomplete analysis.

The complete BIA process is a long time consuming and potential expensive project. There are the wages and time of the experts within each department that have to answer the BIA questionnaire and/or attend the consultant’s BIA workshops, if a consultant is used. The consultant’s fees can become an obstacle for some companies as a BIA may take many months to complete. After the data has been collected, it must be analyzed and recommendations made that will guide the company forward in the development of the BCP.

Once the BCP initiated, what do you do in the following years with the data collected from the BIA?

This is valuable information to the company and the BIA should be updated on a regular basis. In a report “Making the Most of the BIA”, by James R. Mitchell form eBRP Solutions Inc. (located at http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0528.htm ), he gives some ideas on how to continue and update the BIA to ensure that you are protecting the critical business functions within your company.

Personal Influenza Pandemic Planning

There have been numerous articles and checklists produced by various government agencies that warn everyone that a pandemic is overdue and everyone should prepare their homes and families to be able to survive for 72 hours.

While my main business focus is preparing small to medium enterprises to cope with an Influenza Pandemic or other disaster or emergency, I believe that people are being somewhat misled that they will be taken care of during a pandemic and it will be a minor inconvenience at most.

An Influenza Pandemic will last more than72 hours, so what will families do after their 72 hour supply of food, water, basic necessities and medicines run out? They may not be able to get to stores to replenish these items as the stores may be closed due to lack of goods; they may be in a quarantined area; they may still be too sick to venture outside and would they want to go to a place where large numbers of people are gathering for fear of getting infected again. Though once a person has passed through the infectious stage and recovery stage, they will have developed immunity, but the fear will still be there in their minds.

If the population believes that the various levels of government will protect them through the various levels of government’s own Influenza Pandemic plans, I think that these people will be very disappointed. Most plans that I have read from various levels of government are concerned with maintaining the Emergency systems; hospitals, fire and emergency services and police, their plans do not go down to the general population level except to say that hospitals and emergency services will be overwhelmed and it will not be business as usual.

So my advice to individuals, don’t rely on the government to provide the basic necessities that you would need during an Influenza Pandemic, they will be too busy looking after the critical infrastructure. Prepare yourself using the guides for what they are, guides, but remember that stores will close, shops that are open may not be able to be resupplied and the time to recover will be longer than 72 hours, so plan accordingly.