How quick is your trigger finger?

How quick is your trigger finger?

The Business Continuity Institute has just published the results of its 2014 survey into Supply Chain Resilience. The survey, which is the latest in an annual series, generated 525 responses from 71 different countries. A couple of key findings from the survey caught my eye.

The first was that 81 per cent of respondents reported at least one instance of supply chain disruption last year. The second was that loss of productivity, experienced by 59 per cent of respondents, remains the top consequence of supply chain disruptions, followed by increased cost of working (48 per cent) and loss of revenue (45 per cent). So the vast majority of businesses will suffer at least one incident of supply chain disruption a year and they are all likely to impact on your productivity, costs of working and revenue streams. In other words, they will all hit your bottom line.

The key factor here is usually time. The time taken to discover the disruptive incident, the time taken to issue an alert and the time taken to find the right person to fix the problem and resume normal business operations. Some of these factors are beyond control, but one that is not is the average 25 minutes it takes between discovering an incident and issuing an alert to those who need to know. In this case time is quite literally money and reducing the time it takes to issue that alert could make all the difference between speedy resolution and a critical escalation.

Which is why we here at Crises-Control have just introduced a brand new external trigger feature to our business continuity app, that could just save you those precious 25 minutes of time. The new feature allows external triggers that normally generate an automatic e-mail or SMS alert, such as anti-virus software or fire alarms, to be fully integrated into the application alert system. This means that within a few seconds of the external event trigger taking place, the app messaging system also swings into action and sends out a pre-determined alert to everyone within your business who needs to know and could initiate the next level of response.

Integrate your key external suppliers within the application and they will get an alert as well, which means that your whole supply chain, as well as you own key staff, are kept fully informed about the disruption right from the off. Maximising your chances of reducing its impact and ultimately the cost to everyone involved.