Risk: Business Continuity Plan
It is not possible to prevent all disasters and incidents can happen quickly. When a major incident seriously disrupts a supply chain, you need to have a plan in place to ensure that any interruption to your organisations activities is dealt with as quickly as possible.
Your aim should be to know what steps to take to make sure that deliveries to your customers are not affected. In healthcare, disruption in the supply chain can mean that patients do not receive the treatment or care they need, when they need it.
For example, you may import mosquito nets from Vietnam. These mosquito nets will use insecticide from China and reagent from Italy. The product itself will be transported by road and sea. Although the product is relatively simple, there are a number of risks in this supply chain: these can include quality, logistics, weather, and shelf life.
If your organisation is able to respond effectively, it is likely to incur lower costs, provide good customer service, earn their trust, keep confidential information and records safe, and ensure tax payers money is spent so as to ensure good value for money.
Developing a Contingency Plan:
Create a contingency plan that is ready when your organisation needs it.
There are six key elements to your approach:
- Policy:
- Who will have overall responsibility?
- What are the aims and objectives?
- What will you include in the plan?
- Analyse:
- What impact will a risk event have on your business?
- Which are your critical systems?
- Design:
- What action must you take in the event of an incident?
- How can you reduce these risks?
- Implement:
- Who will be responsible for the response to risk incidents?
Develop your business continuity plan and then
- Test:
- Run a trial in order to test the plan.
- Carry out real-life routines in order to practice.
- Revisit:
- Periodically review and continuously improve the continuity plan.
- Keep up to date with changes in your organisation and risks.
The contingency plan has three phases: incident response, disaster recovery plan and business continuity plan.
This is the timeline of the three phases:
The incident response should include identifying the issue and communicating it to key personnel. Reacting quickly and effectively in the right way can minimise the damage.
During the course of preparing the contingency plan, other risks in the supply chain may be identified. This might include bottlenecks, single points of failure or over-reliance on a single supplier, for example. Steps can be taken to address these risks, including holding extra stock, finding additional sources and setting up emergency facilities.
Many organisations report that they become more resilient by carrying out a business continuity programme. They are able to cope with disruptions without interrupting their day to day activities. However most important of all is that their business operations can continue to provide goods and services to their customers and end users whilst they recover.
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