Do you have a strong Business Continuity Plan?
No matter the size, every business can experience incidents that affect business continuity. These can range from losing a key member of staff to IT issues and loss of premises. Delays or lack of planning for such incidents could mean that you lose business, clients, your reputation or worse.
Continuity planning is about having measures in place for efficient and speedy recovery to maintain “business as usual”. The ideal situation is where your clients would never experience the effects of an incident as the process of restoration is seamless.
To build a strong Business Continuity Plan, you need to understand the areas that are at risk if an incident occurs. You then need to identify the contingencies that are already in place and if there are none, consider how to fill the gaps. This may be a two stage process; stage one may be a temporary measure to maintain continuity and stage two is the permanent measure that will bring the business back to peak operation.
It is important to document your plan and include recovery times.
The plan should be reviewed regularly and updated as the business changes and grows.
Risk based thinking will form part of the ISO 9001:2015 revision and is increasingly part of PQQ and tender applications. Therefore, having a solid plan in place can also increase your tendering scores and give current and potential clients confidence in the strength of your business.
Quality System Scotland
Owned by Eileen Baird, Quality System Scotland specialises in ISO 9001, ISO 14001, OHSAS 18001 implementation, auditing, tendering, project management and business improvement. We free up clients\' internal resources by managing ISO responsibilities at a fraction of the cost of an in-house team. Training includes ISO 9001/ISO 14001/OHSAS 18001, internal audit, 5S organisation, project management, mind mapping and user journeys.
