Preparation and planning are critical to achieving positive profitable results in business. This is especially true when setting up a Business Continuity Plan (BCP).

A BCP can drain needed money from your budget if it is not properly targeted to return real value. It may not be realistic to expect that you can restore all business operations after a disaster as if nothing had happened. This can cost more than you can afford to have backups and contingencies to get all business operations back online immediately. The fact is that some trades are more valuable than others. Some are critical to the survival of the business, some are important but can wait to come back online, and others can operate using lower-cost alternatives and workarounds. Think about it, the absolute best way to ensure no disruption to a business is to run 2 duplicate trades; 2 buildings and templates of people who perform identical functions. When one goes down, switch to the other. This may be possible for large organizations, but extremely expensive. And it’s certainly not reality to expect both facilities to be working on exactly the same projects. This is not economic reality.

Like most major projects in life, getting this right requires careful and thorough planning to arrive at the right scope that provides for the necessary contingencies to keep the business viable, but at the same time doesn’t waste money on non-critical functions. . How is this determined? For a BCP, the most critical part of the plan scope is to perform a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). A BIA is a tool to objectively assess the potential consequences of losing a business function. The result of the BIA is that company management can make informed decisions about which operations and functions require resources (people and money) to provide contingencies in the event of a disaster and can determine to what extent this is needed (how much money and resources). . These decisions are based on the criticality of the operation or function.

A BIA documents the key criteria for evaluating each business function or operation, including:

• Business impact if function/operation is lost (loss of profit, cost, etc.)
• How long after the operation ends will the business feel the impact (what will happen after 1 day without this? After 2 days? 5 days? 10 days? etc.)
• Available workarounds (temporary fixes)
• Risk mitigation (things that can be done now before disaster strikes. For example: data files are in the basement and subject to flooding. Can they be moved to a higher floor? Are copies made and stored? stored offsite?)
• Resources necessary to recover the operation of the function (people, materials, time, money)

This BIA process is repeated for each business function/operation deemed important to the business.

From this documented information, the functions/operations are assigned an order of importance. Some are critical to the survival of the business (eg, order processing, customer service, reporting to regulatory agencies, etc.) ). And some may be low priority due to successful risk mitigation (for example, the data files are out of the food zone and backup copies are available, so the risk of loss is low).

The next piece of this puzzle is to determine the target payback time for each of the identified high-cost items; How long after a disaster should they come back online? Can the business survive 2 days without taking orders? Can it survive 3 days? Etc.

By looking at the risk of not having these features online and the potential cost of providing contingencies, you can find a break-even point where the initial investment provides you with the value you need. For example, do you need a 24/7 active hot-site to support online ordering (costs $X)? Or can it be managed with a lower level of service that provides a 1 business day turnaround time (cost $½ X)?

Based on all this quantitative information, it is now possible to effectively design a profitable BCP that targeted the truly important business functions/operations and allocated money and resources wisely to maximize ROI. For example, it may be worth investing in cloud computing or external servers to provide backup for managing inventory or orders. Or it may be wise to contract with an alternative distribution provider or storage facility, if you determine that these are critical to keeping the business alive and must be up and running shortly after a disaster that shuts down your main site or operations.

By following this approach, you’ll be able to quickly and effectively take the necessary steps to keep things running in the event of a disaster, rather than running in all directions frantically trying to fix things and wasting valuable time, money, and customers in the process.

Once you’ve done this homework, the BCP is truly a valuable tool in maintaining the integrity of your business and not just a loss of profit or other document you have to write for auditors and then file.