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BUSINESS CONTINUITY
 2010/01/13  The recent earthquake in Haiti is a poignant reminder of how vulnerable a country is when it is facing disaster on a grand scale. To me, it is a reminder that that while natural disasters are not man-made, the aftermaths and consequences of the disasters often are. Disasters like this call for resilience in all parts of the community, including the infrastructure, the supply chains and society as a whole. Some of the older posts on this blog , and which do not see daylight too often may shed some light on this.
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2010/01/11  Still thinking about my recent post on the importance of security of supply, I first added salt and grit to the list of critical supplies for the UK. Now you can throw in gas, too. The BBC reports that National Grid has issued its latest “balancing alert” on gas supplies. These alerts are a signal to the market to increase gas supplies, and encourage electricity providers to use alternative fuels such as coal. It comes as low temperatures in the UK continued to drive demand, and as outages at the Norwegian gas facility Nyhamna continues. And what is my role here?
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2010/01/05  Does having Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in your supply chain constitute an increased exposure to supply chain risk? Particularly if these SMEs occupy business-critical positions in the supply chain? That’s the question Peter Finch asks in his 2004 article simply (or boldy?) titled Supply Chain Risk Management. I came across this article by mere accident, because it has not been much referenced in the supply chain risk literature. Perhaps, because Peter Finch is not an academic, but a management consultant, and because there is very little academic literature in his reference list, hence not worth mentioning? I don’t think so. This article can very well stand on its own and excellently explains the role that SMEs have in adressing risks in supply chains
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2009/12/22  The idea for this post came from a question on Linkedin: Holidays = Holi.delays? One thing is the usual Christmas/New Year slowdown. Add to that Global Warming suddenly giving the Copenhagen Agreement the cold shoulder, almost literally, causing severe weather all over Europe, the UK, and the United States, leaving travellers stranded on the Eurostar trains under the English Channel, prompting a major rethink of Eurostar’s customer service. People were stuck at airports like Frankfurt, Germany or Luton, UK. It’s the same scene everywhere, chaos, chaos and chaos and lots of people desperate to get home for the holidays. But what about their Christmas presents?
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2009/12/21  
Close calls and near misses are not unusual in the business world, but how do companies deal with them? Published in 1999, the Harvard Business Review on Crisis Management is my third post on the Harvard Business Review Paperback Series, not that I intend to review all 73 of them. But this book reflects much of what is on my mind these days. I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for some time now, and I was planning on a review later this month, but the news on SAAB’s demise compelled me to move up my review in my posting schedule. The closure of SAAB is a major crisis by all standards, and is a fitting reminder that this 10-year old book will never go out of date. Why and how do some companies survive, and some not? This book sheds some light on this.
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2009/12/19  What do you when your major customer goes bust? How do you cope with finding a new business partner? How do you react when a major competitor is no more? I don’t know, but I guess many businesses catering to SAAB in Trollhättan in Sweden will be asking these questions in the next couple of days. Well, they’ve had a year to prepare for SAAB’s demise. Who would have thought that when GM bought SAAB in 1989, that it would take no more than 20 years for GM to run SAAB into the ground, taking with it 60 years of proud Swedish car manufacturing history. SAAB is history, but what will happen to its supply chain?
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2009/11/06 I’m not in the habit of making Friday a day for funny blog posts, but today’s article highlights a very interesting issue: Beer distribution is a sector that will be highly affected by a supply chain distribution…in the UK. You could even say that beer distribution is part of the UK critical infrastructure. At least, that’s the impression I have after reading McKinnon, Alan (2006). Life Without Trucks: The Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport on a National Economy. Seriously, the article is about so much more. It shows how dependent our Just-In-Time-society has become on road transport, and what sectors that are most dependent on road transport. Transportation disruption should thus be part of any business continuity plan.
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2009/08/24 After studying supply chain risk research for some time I have begun to realize that much of the supply chain risk literature lacks direction and that each researcher or strand of researchers have their own presuppositions as to what supply chain risk is and how it should be addressed. In Knemeyer, A. M., Zinn, W. & Eroglu, C. (2009) Proactive planning for catastrophic events in supply chains, fortunately, there is a clear direction for further research and practical application as to how companies can evaluate and plan for catastrophic risk in supply chains.
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2009/07/19  Having access to the most up-to-date business information is vital to any business. That is why you should back up your data regularly. Data backup and data recovery are major ingredients of any business continuity plan. Do you regularly back up vital business information? Not? Well, maybe hard drive recovery may save the day for you after all, should the worst thing happen: your hard drive crashes or is destroyed when you most need it. That is when hard drive repair may come to your rescue.
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2009/07/04  Should we actually bother to spend time and money on disaster mitigation, or should we rather focus on preparing for disaster recovery? Is re-active better than pro-active? The BBC World News has an interesting program called the world debate, that puts the important questions to those in the spotlight, and usually this is not the most exciting program. It’s a panel discussion, where representatives from global politics, finance, business, the arts, media and other areas come together and discuss various matters. More often than not, for the few and selected, but not for the many, and not for me. This morning, however, the topics was disasters and risks, and instead of switching off, as I usually do, I kept watching, and I was taken aback by the diversity of the arguments.
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2009/06/18 How many ways are there for defining vulnerability and criticality, really? Traditionally, risk matrixes have a likelihood/impact approach, but not always. Yesterday, I was examining a criticality/vulnerability matrix. Today, I will take a closer look at a criticality/preparedness matrix with a third susceptibility dimension added to it, as presented in the New Zealand research project Resilent Organisations, a project that has given me plenty of food for thought for my own research in assessing and analyzing resilience.
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2009/06/16  Critical Infrastructure. Which is more important – or ‘critical’ – road networks or computers? What if one day you could no longer use your computer or the Internet for one month, but you could still go anywhere by car? Or what if one day you could no longer go anywhere by car for one month, but you still had your computer or the Internet up and running, which would be worse? I would rather live without computers than without roads…
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