Analyse and assess risks to your business

To develop a business continuity plan you must have a thorough understanding of your business, including its critical functions, their priority and the effect of them being disrupted. This is known as a business impact analysis. If your organisation operates over several sites, each one will need a separate continuity plan. Following analysis of your business processes, develop a list of where it is vulnerable.

Examples of critical functions are:

• staff wages
• call centre
• IT Department
• sales
• manufacture
• distribution
• goods in.

You should consider the importance of each function on the survival of your business (percentage of income or work load, how critical the function is to other functions, etc) and how quickly each must be re-established. For each of the time spans, identify what the effect of the loss of the function would be. For example, disruption to the goods-in function could have the following effect:

First 24 hours

• Lack of stock causing orders not completed on time
• Storage space for part processed goods causing concern

24-48 hours

• Cut manufacturing hours due to lack of stock
• Company reputation damaged

Up to one week

• Financial implications of missed deadlines
• Need to outsource work to maintain market share

Up to two weeks

• Loss of customers to competitors
• Temporary or permanent reduction in staff numbers