While some companies have developed contingency plans, most have not. This lack of preparedness not only threatens the viability of sectors around the world but also jeopardises the delivery of critical goods and services.
According to Kenneth Pooe, Risk and Compliance manager at Lion of Africa Insurance, ‘Business Continuity Planning’ addresses major disruptions, natural or otherwise that could impact the effective execution of an organisation’s core processes.
A ‘Business Continuity Plan’ is designed and intended to minimise the impact of an unforeseen event and to ensure that business operations can continue as per normal as soon as possible.
“A business can never be too small to have a ‘Business Continuity Plan (BCP) ’. A comprehensive BCP should be a pre-requisite for all businesses, regardless of size. Often smaller businesses are impacted more severely from disasters and unforeseen events,” says Pooe.
The implementation of a BCP will assist with:
* The protection and preservation of assets (including personnel, information and physical assets);
* Managing the potentially devastating consequences of events, whilst maintaining the continuity of critical operations, therefore ensuring sustainability and profitability;
* Ongoing protection of organisation’s reputation;
* Working effectively and in co-ordination with its main customers, counterparties, supply chain, the infrastructure providers, regulators and civil authorities in the event of a crisis; and
* Meeting insurance, legal and regulatory requirements.
Businesses should conduct a business impact analysis (BIA) to identify time-sensitive or critical business functions and processes along with the resources that support them and have it reviewed at least, on an annual basis.
They should also conduct a gap analysis to determine gaps between recovery requirements and current capabilities, as well as elect and implement recovery strategies with management approval in order to recover critical business functions and processes. This will result in developing a successful BCP plan.
Lion of Africa Insurance recently executed its BCP plan to overcome a fire incident that occurred at their Johannesburg offices. The fire is suspected to have started around 02:00am on Saturday, 5th October 2013. By early morning, members of the emergency management team were onsite to assess the extent of the damage and coordinate the recovery process.
The BCP was immediately invoked and by midday, an official communication was sent out to all staff members and external parties informing them of the fire incident. The communication also reassured all concerned parties that business would continue as usual with no service interruption whatsoever.
The following can be confirmed after the fire:
* The fire was confined to a non-core area of the building;
* No one was injured during the fire incident as well as during the clean-up operation.
As a result of the BCP being successfully executed, there were no disruptions to Lion’s normal business functions, as it was business as usual on Monday, 7th October, two days after the incident.
“Businesses should not deviate from their business continuity plan once it has been invoked. They should keep it simple and relevant to the respective business,” concludes Kenneth.
