Has the trend towards Just in Time manufacturing stopped, or just stalled? An item on this morning’s Today programme on BBC Radio Four piqued my interest. In the item, Justin Webb was reporting from the Japanese port of Sendai. Sendai was badly damaged by the Tsunami earlier this year and is still not functioning properly…
Survey shows that small businesses need to take Business Continuity more seriously than they currently do The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) recently published its annual survey of disaster preparedness in the UK, and it doesn’t make good reading if you are a small business. Produced in association with AON, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI), The…
Use your investment in Business Continuity Planning to win bigger contracts from larger clients Many companies look on Business Continuity Planning purely as an expense and therefore fail to take it seriously because they believe they have more important things on which to spend their money and their management time. I’d like to persuade you…
Business Continuity Planning should also cover your sources of supply In British Standard BS:25999, Business Continuity Planning is a defined as being “holistic”: in other words “covering the whole organisation”. This term was added to emphasise that Business Continuity Planning should not be restricted solely to the IT infrastructure of a company. Having accepted that…
Accepting risks unknowingly and without understanding the possible consequences is a mug’s game Most businesses, apart from some social enterprises, exist to make a return for their investors by delivering something of value to its clients and customers. Unfortunately, to make the return, too many businesses accept what should be an untenable level of risk….
Business Continuity Planning is all about making changes to business processes that improve the overall resilience of the business. The changes are generally a mixture of risk reduction and mitigation measures; and contingency plans for what to do when something goes wrong. A common mistake when considering what to do to improve the resilience of…
Last week I posted an item entitled “Do your suppliers ever let you down?“. The post summarised the results of the recently released BCI Supply Chain Resilience Survey 2010. I wanted to dig into the data a bit more because I think it contains a real nugget. I speak to lots of manufacturing companies and…
Things can and do go wrong. The question is how well will your business cope when they do? The three P’s If you want to improve the resilience of your business processes, you need to think about what could disrupt them and thus affect your ability to serve your customers. For this, you need to…
You don’t have to be Tesco or Waitrose to realise that failure of part of your supply chain could impact your own viability. If you are like many companies these days, you have a supply chain that provides you with products and services that form part of your deliverables. In the extreme case, you are…
According to Stuart Sterling, assistant director of the SME corporate resilience task force at the Cabinet Office, Small Medium Enterprises (SME – those employing less than 250 employees) are “the soft underbellies of UK plc”. (quoted from Business resilience in the supply chain) Sterling was speaking at the recent BRiSC2010 (Business Resilience in the Supply…
