Later this month it will be 5 years since the Cockermouth
floods of 2009. As well as the tragic death of PC Bill Barker, the
unprecedented flooding ripped through the town leaving hundreds of people
without a home and businesses without premises. Post flood, whilst many took
the opportunity to upgrade their premises, not every business survived.
Sadly this is not unusual. The London Chamber of Commerce
states that 20% of all companies will suffer fire, theft, flood or storm
damage, power failures, terrorism or hardware/software disaster. Of those
without a business continuity plan:
43% will never re-open
80% fail within 13 months
53% of claimants never recoup the losses incurred by a
disaster
One of the benefits of serviced offices is that they provide
an easy solution to disaster planning with much of the thinking being done for
you. Warwick Mill Business Centre has significant experience in disaster
planning. This was of course put to the test in 2005 when floods hit Carlisle.
Thankfully the mill was not affected and as a result became home to a number of
businesses. Companies such as Encompass moved
their now flooded city centre offices here, taking advantage of heated offices,
furniture, working phone lines and internet connection allowing their business
to be back up and running within 24 hours.
Our own disaster and contingency planning means that we have
become a resource for other businesses where disaster planning is critical to
their business. Some of these use us as an agreement to take space in the event
of a disaster; others take a physical space on a permanent basis. This office
is used as a satellite but also the control centre in the case of a disaster
spreading the risk.
As the adage goes, failure to plan is planning to fail so
perhaps it is time to check your businesses disaster plan. Plans can be as detailed as your business requires
but should at the least cover the following 5 key areas:
Program Management – ascertaining your preparedness program,
understanding the regulations that your program must cover.
Planning – Assessing what the risks and hazards are for your
company, conducting a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and examining how you can
reduce and prevent risks and hazards
Implementation – Writing your preparedness plan ensuring that
you cover resource management, emergency response, crisis communications, business
continuity, Information technology, Employee assistance, Incident management
and what training is needed to ensure that plan can be carried out effectively
ProgrammeTesting
Programme Improvement – identifying review dates and future
evaluation.
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