As safety professionals, we have either experienced or understand how emergencies and disasters can affect the physical and emotional well being of the employees we support. We prepare regularly to manage the affects of these incidents through employee training, procedure development and capital investment on appropriate emergency notification or control systems. With these controls and the ongoing testing of their effectiveness, we provide our employers a defense against the adverse impact from various potential natural and man-made risks.
The continued impact of the tragic disasters of 9/11/01 on the business and safety community has been well documented. The most positive impact from those events has been an overall expansion in the awareness of the need to assure employee safety and security. However, what has also happened is that employers are realizing that systems need to be in place for managing their business concerns as well.
Before 9/11, many companies had some level of planning or procedures for the protection of the data within their computer systems. These would usually be in the form of a Disaster Recovery plan or written procedures. In addition to the life safety plans that would be in place, these provided a level of assurance that the employee and business issues from a major emergency or disaster could be minimized. What employers who experienced these incidents have found is that while these systems work independently, there are situations where they overlap and support each other. Due to this realization, businesses have sought a way to manage both concurrently especially in a time where maximizing resources is critical to most.
Business Continuation Planning or "BCP" provides that process or system to help identify the potential risks to the overall business operations and their solutions on an ongoing basis. It defines the who, what, when, where, how and why for the protection and continuation of the overall business operations. The types of interruptions that a BCP can help prepare a business for are varied in nature. Examples of these situations are a sudden loss of utilities for an extended period of time, a severe fire within a manufacturing operation, a complete IT system failure or the impact of a major earthquake on your ability to ship or receive goods.
There are many companies who are becoming aware of the value from investing resources into implementing a BCP. Some are motivated by their own or peers' painful experiences in responding to a major incident, without having an effective system in place. Others are being required by their insurance carriers to create a plan for either getting coverage or to receive a cost break. Along with these is the growing number of our customers who are requiring a BCP of their suppliers to assure some level of support in the event of an incident wrecking havoc on their supply chain.
