Bromsgrove | Redditch | Wyre Forest
North Worcestershire Emergency Planning
Business Continuity Management
Unplanned events can have a devastating effect on small businesses. Events such as fire, damage to stock, illness of key staff or IT system failure could all make it difficult or even impossible to carry out your normal day-to-day activities. At worst, this could see you losing important customers and even going out of business altogether.
Therefore, with good planning you can take steps to minimise the potential impact of a disaster, ideally prevent it happening in the first place. This good planning process is called Business Continuity Management.
What is Business Continuity?
Business continuity management is about identifying those parts of your organisation that you can’t afford to lose, such as information, stock, premises, staff and planning how to maintain these if an emergency occurs.
Any incident, large or small, whether it is natural, accidental or deliberate, can cause major disruption to your organisation. However, if you plan now, rather than waiting for it to happen, you will be able to get back to business in the quickest possible time. Delays could mean you lose valuable business to your competitors, or that your customers lose confidence in you.
Is it complicated to do?
Business continuity management is simpler than you may imagine. To develop a business continuity management plan and implement it you will need to consider the following:
- What are your organisation’s key products and services?
- What are the critical activities and resources required to deliver these?
- What are the risks to these critical activities
- How will you maintain these critical activities in the event of an incident (loss of access to premises, loss of utilities etc)?
I want to know more about Business Continuity Management
Further information is available from The Cabinet Office and The Business Continuity Institute. A Business Continuity Management tool kit is available from GOV UK.