Emergency Plans & Business Continuity
Business continuity is about having common sense precautions in place to help you survive a disruption and recover afterwards should this occur. Here's what you need to consider in order to prepare for an emergency that may disrupt your business.
What would happen if your business suffered a fire or other emergency?
Workplace fires could not only cost lives but also livelihoods, as statistics show, 59% of all business interruption claims are as a result of fire & explosion.
Almost 1 in 5 businesses suffer some sort of disruption every year, be it fire, flood or other emergency.
Following a disaster:
- 25% of businesses never re-open
- 80% of companies who don’t recover in a month are likely to go out of business
- 75% of businesses without Business Continuity plans fail within 3 years.
What is Business Continuity?
In its simplest terms, Business continuity is about having common sense precautions in place to help you survive a disruption and recover afterwards should this occur. This means you need to consider what you would do in order to prepare for an emergency that may disrupt your business.
The types of disruptions you might encounter vary according to your business but are generally accepted as:
- Loss of premises – Do you have an alternative location? Can you hire a temporary building? Being prepared for fire, by having up to date fire risk assessments and adequate working fire detection systems, is just part of the wider picture of being prepared for any type of emergency such as flooding, theft or vandalism.
- Staff shortages – Could you use agency workers to cover short term?
- Loss of utilities – Do you have portable heaters, an electricity generator and access to bottled water?
- Loss of IT – Do you have a maintenance contract, or could you revert to a paper based system in the short term?
- Loss of vehicles – Do you have a call off hire contract in your insurance?
- Loss of supply chain – Do your suppliers have a business continuity plan? If not, do you have a backup supplier?
So think about your critical products and services and the measures you could put in place should any of the disruptions listed above happen.