Staying in Business After an Emergency

7/17/2019 (Permalink)

An emergency that occurs at your business in Norman, OK doesn’t just impact the physical structure of your building. It can affect your employees, your business plan and your bottom line. Having a business continuity plan in place can help minimize the impact of a disastrous occurrence. Follow these four steps to establish your plan.

4 Steps to Establish a Plan to Stay in Business 

1. Business Impact Analysis

The first thing to do is recognize what processes may be affected by an emergency. How you run your business while certified specialists are restoring your building is not going to look the same as it does when your company is fully functional. Your BIA can reveal the core elements that keep your business going and the resources you need to carry them out.

2. Basic Business Function Strategies

Your emergency response plan should include a detailed list of actions and resources. Use the information discovered in your BIA to plan alternatives to your regular business procedures to keep the business running. Then list the resources you need to support these alternatives:

• Necessary space
• Equipment, furniture and office supplies
• Important records and other vital information
• Basic inventory
• Utilities and other outside services
• Human resources

Your business continuity plan is only as good as the support it has.

3. Recovery Team

Put together a team to iron out the details of your plan. The team may consider strategies such as telecommuting for some employees, relocation, contracting some work to third-party services or use of unconventional spaces. The recovery team is tasked with finding manual workarounds for key business functions that are impacted.

4. Testing and Training

You never know if something is going to work unless you try it, and you don’t want to wait until you need your emergency response plan to know if it is going to be effective. No plan is complete until it has been tested and vital personnel have been trained to put it into action.

You cannot always avoid disastrous emergencies. You can, however, make a business continuity plan to deal with their impact.