What is Business Continuity Management BCM? |
What is BCM?
How are you managing any potential disruption to your business? Many enterprises think insurance will cover you for an unforeseen event – that’s what you pay for? An insurance policy will protect you against a fire, flood or natural hazard damaging your building providing cover is up to date and sums insured are correct?
Insurance helps you financially but Business Continuity Management (BCM) helps act as an operational safety net to help meet customer, staff and stakeholder expectations. An insurance claim may take many months or sometimes years to reach a settlement and this will be to an agreed sum less the deductible. During this time what’s happened to your customers and your business?
It’s important to be clear that BCM is not insurance - insurance is an important financial support in the event of a loss. BCM is an operational support before, during and following an event. Therefore, BCM helps meet stakeholder demands.
BCM is about having a process and framework in place to help you understand and prioritise your resources, how much you need, where you need it, when you need it and then provides a roadmap to get your business up and running again following an event.
An effective BCM framework will help you deal with and recover from other forms of disruption beyond the cover provided from insurance. A successful BCM programme will assist in implementing controls that decreases the likelihood or impact of an event adversely effecting your resources if you experience a disruption.
Insurance helps you financially but Business Continuity Management (BCM) helps act as an operational safety net to help meet customer, staff and stakeholder expectations. An insurance claim may take many months or sometimes years to reach a settlement and this will be to an agreed sum less the deductible. During this time what’s happened to your customers and your business?
It’s important to be clear that BCM is not insurance - insurance is an important financial support in the event of a loss. BCM is an operational support before, during and following an event. Therefore, BCM helps meet stakeholder demands.
BCM is about having a process and framework in place to help you understand and prioritise your resources, how much you need, where you need it, when you need it and then provides a roadmap to get your business up and running again following an event.
An effective BCM framework will help you deal with and recover from other forms of disruption beyond the cover provided from insurance. A successful BCM programme will assist in implementing controls that decreases the likelihood or impact of an event adversely effecting your resources if you experience a disruption.
Why Risk Your Business?
Think about some of those events other than a fire, flood or natural hazard that may disrupt you:
- Loss of power
- Loss of IT
- Loss of services
- Evacuation because of a local incident
- Contamination
- Fuel shortage
- Supplier failure
- Infectious disease
- Contract failure……..plus many more.
- Preparing for a disaster, incident or event that could affect your services
- Visualising problems & how to overcome them
- At all times maintaining the key elements of services you provide initially at an emergency level, back up to an acceptable level as soon as possible
- The output will be a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) fit for your business
What will BCM give you?
A well thought out and structured Business Continuity Plan will answer these 3 key questions:
- Where do I go?
- What should I do?
- When should I do it?
The Benefits of BCM
- Reduced risk to life and property
- Prevention of avoidable incidents
- Minimising disruption, maximising profits
- Improved staff co-ordination in an emergency
- Increased staff awareness of risk and means of risk reduction
- Protection of company image
Business Continuity Drivers
- Stakeholder Pressure – staff, shareholders, board members will have an expectation that the business is being well managed including all known risks
- Customer expectations - if these are not met customers will very quickly turn to another supplier
- IT Security – incidents of cyber-attacks and hacking becoming more prevalent
- Corporate Governance – world wide corporate governance arrangements requires risk assessment and risk management strategies on place
- Increased awareness of risk across all businesses
- Business Insurance – you may have reduced cover or reduced premiums if you can demonstrate good Business Continuity Management
- WorkSafe NZ recommendations to carry out regular and effective risk assessments. BCM is just an extension of good risk management