Business Continuity Planning Workshops

Business Continuity Planning helps minimise the risks to your organisation from a serious business-disrupting event

What if?

Why not ask yourself some searching questions:

• what happens if my company suffers a serious fire?
• what happens if the power fails?
• what happens if the IT fails?
• what happens if all our data is lost?
• what happens if your employees can't get access into your main office for a week or two due to a terrorist incident or something more mundane like flooding?
• what happens if we have supply chain problems?

If you can't answer these questions satisfactorily then you need a business continuity plan.

What is Business Continuity Planning (BCP)?

According to the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), business continuity planning:

• is a holistic management process that identifies possible impacts that potentially threaten an organisation
• provides a framework for building resilience and the capability for an effective response.
• safeguards the interests of an organisation's key stake holders, reputation, brand and value creating activities.

This definition applies to every organisation in both the private and public sectors. BCM should not be confused with Disaster Recovery (DR), which tends to focus on the IT systems and IT infrastructure, whereas BCM concentrates on the business processes and how they to keep the business running in the event of a major disruption.

Business Continuity Planning is about:

• identifying your business critical functions and outputs
• identifying and assessing the threats to them
• defining a plan to eliminate, minimise and manage any threat that materialises.

The list of potentially business-disrupting events gets longer every day: viruses, IT failures, fire, trades union action, terrorist attacks and even the good old British weather. A business continuity plan ensures you keep your company running no matter what happens.

A Safetynet Study conducted in 2000 into the effects of the 1993 Bishopsgate bomb in London found that of those businesses without a coherent continuity plan:

• 8% survived
• 40% failed within 18 months
• 12% failed within five years
• 40% never reopened.

These stark statistics illustrate why it is important to have a business continuity plan in place.

Risks to your business

Without a Business Continuity Plan a serious business-disrupting event could result in:

• lost of revenue through unfilled or cancelled orders
• failures within your supply chain
• damage to your brand and reputation
• Health and Safety issues
• HR issues.

And in the worst case scenario a disruption can lead to the closure of a business.

Download our Business Continuity brochure in Abobe PDF format >>>>

Business Continuity Planning Workshops from Omniis

Our one-day workshops show you how to create a business continuity plan - it is an excellent introduction to the whole subject. For more information click here >>

For more information call us on 0800 6128 9091 and find out how you can create a viable business continuity plan for your company.