Business Continuity and Resilience Blog

The effects of Covid-19 have significantly raised awareness of Business Continuity Planning, not least because many office-based firms have adapted and applied their plans and worked from home.  However, the operational impacts could not have been foreseen by many others, including manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and events companies. Why? Because virtually all their pre-planned fallback positions faced the same extraordinary challenge - lockdown with frozen budgets, stalled production and a broken supply chain.

In my experience, rarely do we consider the whole supply chain management picture, a complex system that we totally rely on.  In general, we’re only truly aware of the activities of the handful of organisations we deal with directly as individuals.  We believe in trusted procurement processes, confident that each vendor’s products and services will be delivered on time, and that supplier relationship management will ensure things run smoothly, no matter what.  But stringent tests are usually applied only at the beginning of a relationship and can’t easily pick up subsequent changes in markets, management or standards by our most critical vendors, nor can they see far down the supply chain.  As a result, we’re often left in the dark regarding this important segment of business continuity risk.