Tough times should call for specific and effective measures, not desperate ones. In every business venture, one’s true goal is to prepare for both the highs and the lows. This includes having the necessary measures in place when disasters strike.
Disaster can come in many different forms, which may affect the operational resiliency of a business and how it can bounce back. This can be a devastating natural disaster, a public health crisis, or a security breach that dominoes into a business disruption. In whatever industry, achieving operational resilience should be one of the key priorities to business success.
Having a well-defined resilience plan with specific, actionable steps, and knowing who is accountable for the critical business processes will help any organization prepare, respond, and recover from any type of unexpected event. In order to minimize, if not totally eliminate, the consequences resulting from these disruptions, you need to stay one step ahead and take control of every situation.
In March 2021, the Suez Canal was blocked by a 20,000 TEU container ship that affected the world economy for about 6 days. This single obstruction halted all other container vessels passing the Canal, which resulted in a loss of approximately 9 billion dollars. This incident is the perfect example of a disaster that can easily domino into a business disruption that can affect many.
Blog: If Resiliency is Our Common Thread, How Do We Weave It?
Within your organization, what measures do you have in place to keep the business afloat in times of disaster? Have you been developing resiliency plans across different business functions? How about discussions around the use of emergency management software? How much disruption can your business tolerate? How much loss can it survive while still being able to get back on its feet? These are just some of the questions that are worth asking when trying to achieve operational resilience.
Why Your Business Needs to Develop an Operational Resilience Strategy
There are several factors that contribute to the unexpected circumstances your business might be in.
What if suddenly your company experiences a data breach? What if a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic massively impacts how you operate your business? There are various “what ifs” that need strategies and planning to remedy.
Operational resilience ensures that your business is continuously operational in times of disaster. Developing an end-to-end operational resilience strategy supports and hones the ability of your organization to immediately respond and adapt to the changes in the environment, systems, and processes.
Part of the challenge, however, comes from the existence of several disciplines in large enterprises where a particular business function has its own distinct processes, systems, and applications running separately. Developing an operational resilience strategy across an entire organization can feel like an overwhelming challenge.
But what if it were possible to have one platform that has the ability to gather and merge information relevant to developing an effective operational resilience strategy?
What An Emergency Management System Is and Why Your Business Needs One
An emergency management system is advanced software that is used to manage complex systems and varied personnel in order to respond to severe events across all risks and stages of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
With the correct analysis of potential risks in the business and the correct data input into the system, you are able to identify possible hazards that may affect the business. This helps evaluate the risks in terms of their chance of occurrence, their potential impact, and your vulnerabilities to that impact. Emergency management systems offers a foundation for understanding how organizational vulnerabilities can be handled.
In order for the software to effectively carry out its work, specific, detailed, and accurate data should be collected. Whether it’s remedying natural disasters by looking for affected areas, or monitoring employee and facility statuses, your business would be able to statistically estimate what could happen and how it may affect the business. From the healthcare industry, to the finance world, down to government organizations, operational resilience through emergency management systems is key.
Next Steps to Achieving Operational Resilience
As operational resilience proves its necessity in various industries, you might be wondering, what are the next steps to employ these resiliency plans?
Operational resilience is consistently developed over time and built with everyone involved in the business. There are 8 key steps to achieve operational resilience for your business to prepare for all types of vulnerabilities and all types of risks. These 8 steps to achieve operational resilience will outline the needed manpower, data, preparations, and assessments that would help your organization become more resilient in nearly any situation.
As these systems are put in place to help your business succeed and move past every “what if,” you and your employees get to focus more on what matters most— growing your business and maintaining operations as usual.
