About the only certainty left is in the way they increase risks to an organisation in terms of business continuity. Risks that you have to manage in a recession-free environment, that range from IT failures to natural disasters, will still be present if recession arrives. It’s the new risks that you’ll also need to be aware of, and for which you’ll need to plan. To complicate matters, some are less obvious because they affect your organisation indirectly via their impact on partners and suppliers.
Posts Tagged ‘Supply Chain’
Minimising the impact of recession on how well you recover
Monday, December 12th, 2011Benchmarking and business continuity
Tuesday, December 6th, 2011Benchmarking business continuity means different things to different people, judging by the variety of information available. In one case, the standard by which comparisons are to be made is based on how many organisations (manufacturers and service providers) think their BC plan covers their supply chain risks. Opinions are subjective and no guarantee of results. Yet if organisations looked at how supply chains themselves have developed an approach to benchmarking, they might find a better model to adopt for benchmarking their BCM.
Business Continuity After Customer Collapse
Friday, November 4th, 2011Disaster recovery and business continuity are often thought of in terms of floods, fires, explosions and similar physical events. What may be less obvious to BC planners but just as critical to the survival of an organisation are the non-physical events, such as the loss of a major customer or a major change in a company’s stakeholders. The collapse of the global financial services firm Lehman Brothers was a case in point. At the same time, the company was a major customer of the Euroclear Bank and a major stakeholder of the then fifth largest hedge fund in the US, D. E. Shaw & Co. Luckily Euroclear had already planned for the event. (more…)
Key Supplier Resilience as part of Business Continuity Management
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010It is not enough just to look at the resilience strategies for within your organization, the entire supply chain needs to be considered for your critical business functions.
Are you reliant on a single supplier for any key products or services?
If you have alternate suppliers, are they geographically separate or in other ways diverse from your primary supplier? If your primary supplier was affected by a problem, how likely is it this backup supplier would be too?
Can you build the requirement for these suppliers to have robust and verified business continuity in place for themselves into your supply agreements?
What are your workarounds and strategies if supply of these products or services were cut-off?
All of these questions should be examined as part of a robust business impact analysis of your critical business functions. Having a BCP is more than just a tick in the box for your audit report. It is about having confidence in your organization’s resilience. What a great selling feature for your clients, if you can confidently state you’ve got a mature and resilient organization that will stay in operation when others may fail!