Business Emergency Planning

In the past I have posted articles about being personally prepared for an emergency, and my focus was specifically on 72 hour kits and evacuations, whether because of an emergency in your home or a more widespread emergency in the community.

As we have seen in this past couple of weeks, it is very important to be prepared personally, but it also important to have your business prepared for a disaster.

Developing The Plan
Here are some points to consider when developing your Emergency response Plan or Business Continuity Plan:

 - Identify the purpose of your business, who you serve and what you do for them.

 - Identify the critical services you must provide and the resources you need to provide them.

 - Identify the most probable disasters, such as fire, flood, snow storm, electricity outage, phone service outage, lack of staff (sick or can’t travel…).

 - Look at the impacts of the disasters on your business.  Many impacts can be grouped into a few categories: 

• no reduction in resources, 
• a reduction in resources, 
• complete or almost complete lack of resources.

 - These impacts then determine what you can do:

• able to operate as normal
• able to operate at lower service capacity 
• close down temporarily or permanently

 - Always keep in mind that the emergency impacts not just you and your staff, but may impact your suppliers and definitely impacts your customers.  

Once you have your general capability categories you then set out your responses.  It is often easier to come up with a list of actions first and then put them in the order they need to happen.

Emergency Scenarios Can Help Give Direction
If you are having trouble getting started with this process, a very revealing way to find out what matters in your business and what you can do in an emergency is try to draw up a realistic disaster scenario and walk through it.  If your business consists of just you it might be best to have someone you can trust to bounce ideas off of, and if your company is a bit larger use your management team to walk through a practice.  in the simulation, to reflect that decisions have to be made quickly and often without all the needed information,  some companies make 5 minutes in the scenario meeting represent 1 hour in real life.

This walk through often reveals areas that need improvement.  Usually it reveals that the management needs more information about resources, personnel and technology.  

Each scenario walk through can reveal more data that is needed to make a comprehensive business continuity plan.  The plan will probably also influence some of your regular activities, like adjusting access to inventories or who has access to the building when other staff is isolated.

You should also find out what your local municipality has in their emergency plan and how that might affect your business.  For example - how might their response to fire impact you.  Municipalities often post online the most common emergencies they for which they have planned and practiced.

The Clearwater County website has a lot of information to help with personal preparedness that is also useful for businesses at http://www.county.clearwater.ab.ca/departments/page.jsp?pid=63

Once your Emergency Plan is complete it is important that it is not just stored and forgotten.  The plan should be reviewed once a year to make sure it is still relevant.

Some general questions to consider:

• Will you be able to serve your customers if you have limited resources?
• If there is a general area emergency, will your customers still want your service or product during the emergency?
• How will you communicate with your staff, customers or suppliers?
• How will you make payments or receive payments?
• Is your business information backed up or protected?
• Can you quickly recover from most disasters?

Some examples of emergencies your business could experience

Isolated area of your operations/office/building: 

• Extended duration: fire in closet destroys phone system, water pipe breaks over servers
• Short duration: flu bug infects customer service department 

Entire operations/office/building: 

• Extended duration: fire destroys entire office, shooter onsite, computer virus attack
• Short duration: sewage backup causes an evacuation, computer virus attack

Isolated small geographic area (e.g. approximately a city block):

• Extended duration: flood, tornado, civil unrest
• Short duration: power loss, police action

Large geographic area (e.g. Entire city or several counties)

• Extended duration: hurricane, earthquake, wildfire
• Short duration: power outage, storm

http://operationstech.about.com/od/disasterrecover1/a/DisastrRcov-Risk-Management.htm

The Alberta Emergency Management Agency has some excellent information about Business Continuity Planning for municipalities that can be applied to businesses as well.
http://www.aema.alberta.ca/se_business_continuity_planning.cfm