Business Continuity Management
What will you do if staff or customers can’t get to your business premises because of a flood? How will your business keep going if half your staff can’t get into work, or are sick? What happens if you can’t update your Internet site or take credit card payments because the phone system is down? How long can you operate without electricity or running water?
As an integral part of building resilience to disruptive challenges to the community, Waltham Forest wants your organisation to succeed and is offering free advice on Business Continuity Management (BCM).
Our aim is to promote business continuity by raising awareness of the likely challenges facing your business, and providing generic advice on how you can plan to keep your business going if the worst happens. BCM will assist you to:
- protect your business and reputation
- solve potential disruption in advance
- identify alternative suppliers before it is too late
- be in a position of competitive advantage in an emergency.
If you run your own business, perhaps your competitors are hoping you don’t have your act together in the event of a crisis. Do you think they will hold back and not take your failure as an opportunity?
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Put simply, BCM is about:
A well-developed Business Continuity Plan (BCP) will help any organisation protect their:
Business Continuity Management Report 2009 (Chartered Management Institute) stated: · 34% of staff do not know if their company had a business continuity plan |
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· 15% of surveyed organisations are confident their plans are effective!
· 41% of staff say they don’t understand or haven’t taken the time to read their plans.Organisations that are crisis-prone exhibit a different mindset to those of crisis-prepared. In each phase of a crisis, questions are raised and critical lessons are identified to learn from.
Crisis-prone organisations on the other hand are more prone to find excuses and assign blame than actually learning. No organisation can actually prevent all crises, however they can lower the likelihood of their occurrence, lower their costs and lower the potential related condemnations.
A free z-card is available to assist SME’s and voluntary organisations in kick-starting their resilience planning by providing a tool to record important details including insurance information and staff, customer, supplier and support contacts.
The z-card aims to assist SME’s as well as voluntary organisations during a crisis event such as loss of key staff or building access or Information Technology infrastructure, which could otherwise ruin their business.
For further information please visit: www.walthamforest.gov.uk, call 0208 496 3000, or email business.continuity@walthamforest.gov.uk
