Business continuity in an uncertain world
Nearly 1 in 5 businesses suffer a major disruption every year. Your business could be next. With no recovery plan, you have less chance of survival.
How quickly - and painlessly - you manage to get back to ‘business as usual’ in the event of a terrorist attack, fire, flood or other natural disaster, or any other major interruption, depends on how effectively you can devise, and put into action, your own business continuity management.
What is business continuity?
It is a planning process, which provides a framework for ensuring resilience of your business to threats and challenges. This approach will help you to ensure that key customers, your brand, reputation and key suppliers are maintained, as well as your long-term survival.
Business continuity needs to be considered by small companies and organisations as well as larger corporations. Plans need to be clear, simple (but not simplistic) and tailored to the needs of the business. Incidents and disasters can have catastrophic effects on businesses and the threats can come from incidents originating through accidents, criminal activity or incidents created by the natural elements. Business continuity should become part of the way you perform business. It is better to plan for incidents occurring to your business rather than having to “fire-fight” when it actually happens.
Why have it?
Without business continuity, any kind of unexpected event could result in:
- Loss of work to competitors
- Failures within your supply chain
- Loss of reputation
- Staffing and human resource issues
- Health and Safety liabilities
- Higher insurance premiums
It is not just disasters that business continuity applies to. It can be for anything which affects the ability of your business to continue to function. In relation to your staff for example you could lose them:
- to a competitor;
- due to fuel shortages (they can’t get to work);
- through illness or accident – pandemic flu or food poisoning; or
- because of them having a lottery syndicate win!
Similarly you would need to consider the impact the loss of your buildings, equipment or suppliers would have and how these may come about.
How can we help you?
We are currently developing an advanced Business Continuity Plan for use across our wide variety of services and resources. We are doing this in order to ensure that in the event of any disruption we can maintain our critical services to the community.
We also recognise the importance that to improve the resilience of the borough as a whole, we need to ensure that the businesses, organisations and voluntary groups which make up the area also have robust continuity arrangements in place. We also provide this information in the spirit of the Civil Contingencies Act and under the responsibilities it imparts upon us.
In providing this advice we hope that we are helping to introduce business continuity to those that may not have come across it before. In addition we hope that we can sign-post people to the wide variety of resources which are freely available to businesses on the subject.
Over the next 12 months we hope to develop this web information to include plan templates and additional resources. We are also planning to bring business continuity to your organisations through a variety of workshops and events that will be free to attend and will take place across the whole of Greater Manchester. Please contact us via the details below to register an interest or if you have any suggestions or ideas.
Related information
Promoting business continuity leaflet
As part of the Greater Manchester Local Authority Business Continuity group, we have produced a leaflet called ‘Promoting Business Continuity’.
The leaflet is a short introduction to the subject for businesses of any size who want to ensure they can survive after a major disruption. It provides simple, easy to follow guidance on how businesses can protect themselves and steps you can take when developing internal arrangements and business continuity plans.
Download Promoting Business Continuity leaflet (138kb 13 page pdf)
Nationally agreed BCM promotional leaflet
The Cabinet Office has produced a BCM promotional leaflet for national use.
National BCM Promotional Leaflet Part 1
National BCM Promotional Leaflet Part 2
Business Continuity Advice & Guidance for businesses and the voluntary sector provide through DirectGov website:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Dealingwithemergencies/Preparingforemergencies/DG_175927
Further more local information about Emergency Planning for your businesses can be found on this website at:
Emergency Planning Advice
Links to other websites
In addition to the work we have produced locally there are a number of nationally produced documents.
‘Expecting the Unexpected’ is a government publication available through Bury MBC, which guides you through the entire Business Continuity process. To download a copy please visit UK Resilience website or contact us for a hardcopy and CD-ROM.
‘Secure in the Knowledge’ details how businesses can protect themselves from a variety of threats and build up organisational security beyond that of the lock and key. To download a copy please visit UK Resilience website.
North West Business Crime and Continuity Survey is available to download at the NW Regional Intelligence Unit website
How to contact us
For more information on business continuity, a list of other useful resources and what you can do to implement it within your business contact Nick Folkes, Emergency Planning Manager.
Phone: 0161 253 7732
E-mail: businesscontinuity@bury.gov.uk
