A business continuity plan (BCP) is essential for organizing and planning your business operations to accommodate any disruptions. But like any other business strategy, it has benefits and challenges.
According to Delloite, the key to a successful business entails more than service delivery and customer retention. It also factors your ability to survive any unexpected pitfalls that may knock down your business.
This article explores some factors that may impact your BCP in 2022, plus the advantages and disadvantages of having this strategy in place. We also recommend working with reliable BCP software to increase efficiency.
What Is A Business Continuity Plan?
A business continuity plan is, in essence, a business continuity management system (BCMS). It considers a business’s steps in emergencies and the next few months after the disruption. A BCP typically includes a checklist of the company’s critical resources and assets, such as:
- Supplies
- Equipment
- Data backups
- Backup site locations
- Contact information for emergency responders,
- Key personnel and backup site providers.
The ideal BCP must contain strategies to continue with business operations in case of short and long-term outages. One key benefit of a business continuity plan is a disaster recovery strategy that includes guidelines for:
- Handling IT disruptions
- Reestablishing office productivity
- Protecting company and customer data
- Delivering and meeting client needs amidst the crisis
The BCP should have a manual backup plan to continue operations until computer systems are back and running. The three aspects of a BCP include:
- High availability: Continuity strategies should be available for access on other mediums to create timely solutions to crises.
- Disaster recovery: Create a data recovery plan in a different location if the primary site is destroyed.
- Operations continuity: Strategies to keep things running even as you work to bring the company back on its feet.
What Are The Advantages Of Business Continuity Planning?
The key benefit of a business continuity plan is to provide counter-strategies to keep the business afloat in times of crisis. These strategies allow for quick and calculative reactions to minimize the impact of a disaster or disruption and resume entire operations within the shortest time possible. The benefits of a business continuity plan are numerous and include the following:
- Supporting the company’s long term strategies
- Creating a strategic advantage against competitors
- Demonstrating to stakeholders that their needs are being taken seriously
- Addressing operational vulnerabilities
- Ensuring the business stays running during and after a disaster
- Restart operations within the shortest time possible
- Reduce the cost of managing business disruptions
- Protect your business reputation
- Increase regulatory compliance
- Protect your customers and employees
- Maintain your insurance terms
Don’t worry if your company doesn’t have a BCP in place. It’s never too late to start, and you might want to start by conducting a business impact analysis.
A business impact analysis helps you analyze your business, including its critical assets, resources, and people that keep it running, plus the impact of a potential crisis.
How Does Business Continuity Help Different Departments?
A business continuity plan is applicable in any industry and various departments. Regardless of which sector or department your business belongs to, here’s how a BCP can impact it.
Customer Service
As long as you are compliant with service level agreements (SLAs), having a BCP helps increase your corporate reputation with B2C customers. This is especially important for companies within the health, food, medical, and real estate industries.
Marketing
A BCP allows you to preplan and utilize the best marketing channels so you can reassure customers and stakeholders that you have everything under control.
Finance
Integrated planning and rolling forecasts give you a real-time global view of your company’s circumstances. And with a real-time picture, you can quickly adapt to changing trends.
Human Resources
Create a list of assets managed by each employee to understand everyone’s capacity, especially with remote working.
Operations
BCP provides facility information and floor plans. This information can be relayed to emergency service teams to help accelerate rescues.
What Should You Consider When Developing A Business Continuity Plan?
A BCP supportive framework is the Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) with the ISO-22301 standard. It highlights the requirements and clauses that support a standardized management system. The most vital considerations for drafting a BCMS include:
- Choosing your business’s most essential services to keep it operational in a crisis. This can be achieved through a risk assessment.
- Determining which bird’s members should be part of the reaction team. These people should include first responders to the disaster or disruption and authorized persons to access critical company data.
- Providing leadership and guidance by planning, testing performance, doing updates, etc. This way, you can always stay abreast of business strategies and changes in those strategies.
Are There Downsides To Having A Business Continuity Plan?
You now understand the importance of a business continuity plan. However, besides the BCP benefits highlighted above, it also comes with a few challenges. For example:
- Creating a BCP is costly and time-consuming.
- It requires third-party expert advice, some of which may not apply to your business situation or support your objectives.
- Most BCP plans are requirements checklists instead of actionable, practical documents.
- The company leadership may not be willing to share the document with employees who may need it. When employees are unprepared for any eventuality, it becomes impossible to salvage the situation collectively.
How A BCP Software Can Help You Maintain Your Business Continuity
Perhaps your company doesn’t have a working BCP yet. That’s no cause for panic, as organizations tend to toy with the idea of developing a BCP without doing it. Many companies don’t have an actionable business continuity plan, and neither do they understand the critical benefits of BCP, which is disaster management and recovery.
Knowing the BCP benefits helps you make the right decision to ensure your company’s survival while also protecting the needs of your stakeholders. That said, you can leverage the features and capabilities of your BCP software to create an efficient disaster recovery plan. Here’s what to expect from the ideal BCP portal:
- Simplify the complicated processes: Minimize complex and tedious tasks to improve clarity and efficiency.
- Unify fragmented communication: Streamline burdensome and time-consuming processes. Create actionable plans and execute the next steps.
- Seamless Collaboration: Make informed decisions faster and improve efficiencies in your business operations based on real-time data and analytics. An intuitive software helps you surface actionable insights and coordinate activities from the board right down to team leadership.
- Enjoy peace of mind: Keep your sensitive data and company secrets safe with the Meeting feature. The ideal software should be designed with security features that meet compliance, privacy, data protection, and global security requirements. It should be able to give you total control over who can access and utilize your BCP data.
To learn more about BCP and the steps to creating a practical, actionable plan, talk to us. Or, if you’d like to work with some of the most efficient and intuitive software available today, talk to us.
