Business Continuity Planning For Your Business
It is evident from our research that customers are now placing high priority on finding suppliers that are ISO compliant for their approved suppliers lists.
Here at ISO Certification Services our qualified standards auditors are here to help your business prosper. We cover standards such as Quality, Health and Safety, Environmental, Information/Data Security, Business Continuity and Security Guarding and all our auditors have full business management experience.
Conversations with our clients reveal that business continuity is increasingly important to customers.
In the majority of cases, ISO standards are not about having to completely change the way you already work – they are simply about adding best practice to your current working methods, giving full reassurance to existing and potential customers through on-going accredited certification.
Business continuity has far reaching effects on all companies – whatever the size of their operation.
The problems Honda experienced following the devastation wreaked by the Japanese tsunami illustrate clearly the vital importance of giving careful and timely consideration to business continuity.
The supply problems that resulted from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated north eastern Japan proved to be a learning experience for Honda, according to one of their top company executives.
What came up for Honda was the issue of placement of suppliers. In particular, one supplier had a major component that it could not manufacture for them because of production problems following the tsunami damage.
Honda decided to redeploy their associates in Japan to help in the rebuilding, in order that they could get back online. Honda learnt the importance of reacting quickly and nimbly in adapting to change and now have two separate suppliers in place for this particular component, to guard against such difficulties arising in the future.
Business Continuity Planning is critical to every organisation, large or small. Here at ISO Certification Services, we deal with companies from small, one person businesses up to global blue chip organisations and we know the importance of a carefully considered approach to Business Continuity.
The ability of an organisation to recover from a disaster is directly related to having a clearly defined Business Continuity Plan in place before hand. Industry analysts claim that two out of five companies that experience a disaster will go out of business within five years of the event.
Business Continuity Plans are critical to the smooth continuous operation of all types of businesses, especially now that companies become increasingly reliant on technology to do business. With increased emphasis on IT and communication services – to support their customer communications and transactions, or to help manage supply chains – they become less tolerant of information and service loss as a consequence of disasters.
Business Continuity Planning takes account of specific risks and scenarios ranging from major business premises loss to local system failure. Recovery of key business functions, IT, data and voice communications as well as essential personnel and offsite locations are vital, considering threats such as hacking and unnatural disasters.
Business Continuity Planning is critical for organisations to maintain operational effectiveness and flexibility in any given scenario.
Here at ISO Certification Services, we can help you identify your organisations critical business processes and organise priorities and timescales for recovery.
Areas for consideration will include:
- Identifying the specific risks to your organisation (e.g. hackers, terrorism, natural disasters)
- What effect these would have on your business
- How you would go about recovering your finance records and be able to prove what payments you’ve made and what monies customers owe you?
- How long recovery would take, what costs would be involved and how effective is the solution?
- Prioritising critical components of your business – for example having your website up and running and/or your phone system reconnected following an event?
- Safety and wellbeing of employees
- Recovery of data and systems
- Procedures for employees to report back in to work – in the events of your current offices being unavailable where are you going to do business instead?
- How can you best prevent or minimise the effects of a disaster on your business?
- Improving systems security and enhancing penetration testing to avoid the likelihood of hacking threats to your company.
So if you’re looking to safeguard the future of your organisation, ISO Certification Services are here to help you do just that. For a friendly no obligation chat, why not contact us today. We also have a free on-going email and telephone helpline for use by all our customers to help answer your standards related questions.
We look forward to receiving your call today.
