Have you ever thought about the significant crossover between best practice in procurement strategy and best practice in business continuity planning? If not, then consider that a core principle of both is the need to ensure that as a business you have quick and reliable access to secondary suppliers of key goods and services that will keep the business running in the event of a break in your normal supply chain.
Do you have a document that identifies your key suppliers? Do you know if your key suppliers have a business continuity policy? Have you mapped out incident response plans for your key suppliers? Do your crisis response teams have a mass-communication tool that can reach out to your suppliers as well as your own employees?
The last question is particularly relevant to how Crises Control can help you and your organisation in managing your business continuity processes. Using our hassle-free tool, your incident response teams can communicate instantly to all of your nominated stakeholders in seconds across multiple platforms. Within minutes of a crisis incident being activated, all your stakeholders will receive a notification on their mobile app, or by email, text message, or phone. Or, if you wish, on all four channels together.
When disaster strikes you don’t need a big book that has rules and governance and the rest of the material that forms best practice continuity planning. What you do want is incident specific action plans and information that will help your response team to act. To this end, Crises Control enables you to create incident specific plans and process support material. Integrating your supply chain into business continuity planning will have several benefits, other than reducing overall operational risk: – closer relationship with your key suppliers – mutual appreciation of each others’ business objectives – common language and processes leading to smoother incident resolution – better pricing as your business will be less risky in the supplier’s eyes
A 2013 study by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) found that 90% of organisations have not considered procurement as part of business continuity. Don’t let that be you. You can find out more statistics on the subject of supply chains and business continuity in the full BCI report.
The BCI are holding their annual Business Continuity World Conference in London on the 5th and 6th of November 2014. The Crises Control team will be there too. If you are wondering where to start with supply chain continuity, or business continuity in general, come and visit us at the BCI World Conference. We will have a stand demonstrating our self-guide incident creation tools and our state-of-the-art communication tools.
We want you to eliminate operational risks without breaking the bank. If you can’t make the BCI Conference, visit us at www.crises-control.com to learn more.
