Business Continuity
Planning & Management
Business Continuity Plan
The term “Business Continuity Plan” popped up after the 9/11 tragedy but really became a widely used buzz phrase after hurricane Katrina. Since then the line between what is a Business Continuity Plan and what is a Disaster Recovery Plan has been blurred in the IT world. Executives and business owners are interchanging the two terms, when in reality the Disaster Recovery Plan is just one part of a Business Continuity Plan.
A true Business Continuity Plan takes all of the aspects of your business and put them to the “what if” test. Logistics is an important arm of a manufacturing business. If the product being manufactured was always shipped via rail and a rail accident caused rail shipments to be halted for a long period of time, how would you get your product to market? Manufacturing your organization product on time is very important today especially since the advent of the “Just-in-Time” strategy. If the power goes out at the manufacturing facility, what do you do? These are just a couple of examples that need to have their own response plan of action. These plans go into the overall Business Continuity Plan. One of the reasons that the line has been blurred is that to solve these two business problems, your organization may use computers or technology to solve them. Like placing an order to a trucking company to come and get you product and get it routed to market, or taking the customer orders from the downed plant and route them to a plant that is online. Aperio cannot write the whole Business Continuity Plan, but we can give suggestion on how some of the possible problems could be solved through technology. We do however want to heavily participate in the writing of the IT Disaster Recovery Plan.
