Womens Clothing Shop Business Continuity Plan

Womens Clothing Shop Business Continuity Plan

Womens Clothing Shop Business Continuity Planning is a holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten your Womens Clothing Shop business and provides a framework for building resilience with the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of you, your company and its reputation and the money the business puts in your pocket.

 

Its primary use is to allow you to continue to manage your Womens Clothing Shop business under adverse conditions, by the introduction of appropriate strategies, objectives and crisis management plans. A great Business Continuity Plan (BCP) is the least expensive insurance any company can have (especially for small companies, as it costs virtually nothing to produce).

 

Unfortunately, many failed companies never took the time to develop such a plan.

 

Business Continuity Plans are sometimes referred to as Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP) and the two have much in common. However a DRP should be oriented towards recovering after a disaster whereas a BCP shows how to continue doing business until recovery is accomplished. Both are very important and are often combined into a single document for convenience.

 

Know your Womens Clothing Shop business

In order to develop your Womens Clothing Shop business continuity plan you need to have a thorough understanding of your Womens Clothing Shop business. This involves knowing the critical functions of your business, the affect of those functions being disrupted and the priority for recovery of those functions. This process is known as a business impact analysis.

 

To complete a business impact analysis for each critical function follow the guidance below:

 

Critical function

 

You need to consider what the critical functions / activities are for your business – without which it would cease to operate!

 

Examples of critical functions are:

• Staff wages – what if they were not paid?
• Telephone – what if it was disconnected
• IT department – what if you lost your network or website?
• Goods In – what happens in bad weather conditions?
• Distribution – what if you cannot deliver or have to shut?
• Manufacture – if you make anything what if you could not get the raw materials or a key machine broke-down?
• Supplies – what if a supplier goes out of business?

 

You will need to complete a business impact analysis for each of your critical functions / teams.

 

Effect on your Womens Clothing Shop business

You should consider the importance if the function on the survival of your Womens Clothing Shop business (percentage of income or work load, how critical the function is to other functions, etc) and how quickly each function must be re-established.

 

For each of the time spans, identify what the affect of the loss of the critical function would be.

 

For example:

• What would happen in the first 24 hours – it may not be a problem
• 24 hours – 48 hours – At what stage do you start losing business?
• Up to one week – What are the financial implications?
• Up to 2 weeks – How many customers would be lost? How many staff?

 

Resources required for recovery:

• Number of staff - You will probably not need all of your staff to be present immediately after an emergency.
• For each time span, detail how many staff you would need. For example if you had a problem with a key supplier how many staff would be doing nothing?

 

Relocation

 

Could this function be carried out by your staff anywhere else?

 

For example,

• working from home,
• in another office,
• mutual aid with another organization, etc.

 

Resources required

 

For each time span, list what resources are required e.g.

• Computers (hardware and software)
• Vehicles
• Machinery
• Communication equipment (landlines / mobiles)

 

Data Required: List what data is essential to the delivery of the service / critical function. e.g.

• Customer contact details – if you lose your PCs / network what else do you lose?
• Supplier contact details
• Service / maintenance contacts and contract numbers
• Insurance details
• Costing
• Work in progress

 

The completed Womens Clothing Shop business impact analysis will assist you to prioritize what or service you need to reinstate first during an emergency.

 

Using your Womens Clothing Shop business impact analysis, complete the critical function priority list in the plan template.

 

Assess the risks

Risk is a statement of the chance of something happening that will impact on your business. Risk is normally considered in terms of likelihood of a hazard affecting your business. By assessing your risks you will be able to prioritize your risk reduction activities.

 

There are many hazards that may disrupt your Womens Clothing Shop business, these include:

• Flooding
• IT failure / loss of data
• Utility failure
• Fire or explosion
• Transport accident
• Extreme weather
• Loss of premises
• Staffing issues

 

These hazards will affect different businesses, and the critical functions within them, to varying degrees.

 

Hazard

 

List the specific hazards faced by your organization

 

Hazard Impact

• List the physical disruption that may be caused
• List the financial implications of this disruption
• List people affected by the disruption (staff, clients, partners)
• Loss of access and utilities (electricity, phones, etc.)
• Water damage to equipment and stock
• Cost of damage and or fines pollution
• Customer and suppliers

List what you currently do that prevents or reduces the likelihood and or the impact of the hazard on your business?

 

e.g. Flooding

• Monitor Flood Warnings issued by Environment Agency
• Insurance to cover damage to equipment and premises

 

Mitigation possible

 

List what additional actions can be taken to prevent or reduce the likelihood or the impact of the hazard on your business

 

e.g. Flooding

• Relocate office / store to higher ground
• Floodgates / sandbags stored ready for use

 

By determining the likelihood of the hazard occurring (either high or low), then determining the impact that hazard has on your business, it is possible to rate the risk as accept or threat.

• Accept – You may decide that you are happy to ‘live with’ the risk as the cost of implementing any risk reduction strategies may outweigh the benefits.
• Threat – You want to treat the risk i.e. take steps to reduce the impact or reduce the likelihood (‘possible mitigation’) because the risk is too great for your business.

 

It is not possible to mitigate against all risks, this is why a plan is required.

 

Formulate the Womens Clothing Shop business continuity plan – to respond to an emergency

Having completed the business impact analysis and hazard analysis table, you now need to develop a generic checklist of actions that may be appropriate when an emergency occurs. The checklist in the plan template is designed for you to adapt to suit your business. You may wish to add text into the plan to outline any arrangements you already have in place.

 

The checklist can be used during an emergency to ensure that no major tasks are forgotten.

 

Start a log of actions taken

 

It is essential to keep a log of the actions you have taken and the decisions you have made. Include a time with each entry. This information will be vital if you have to defend in court any actions you have taken.

 

Liaise with the emergency services

If the emergency services are involved in the Incident you will need to appoint someone from your organisation to act as a liaison officer. This person needs to pass information between the emergency services response and your internal response team.

 

Identify any damage

 

As soon as possible, and only if safe to do so an assessment must be made as to the extent of the damage caused by the emergency.

 

Consider and document the following:

• Injury to staff, contractors, public
• Damage to buildings
• Damage to equipment / vehicles
• Damage to stock
• Damage to reputation

 

Identify functions disrupted

 

Document which functions or areas have been disrupted and the extent of the disruption.

 

Convene your business recovery team

 

You need to pre-identify who, within your organization, will make up the team that will manage the response and recovery of the emergency.

 

If the emergency is such that you need to call the team together you need to do so as soon as possible.

 

Provide information to staff

 

It is essential to keep your staff informed regarding the emergency and the response actions being taken.

 

Staff may be concerned about

• Colleagues who may be injured
• What is expected of them today
• Should they turn up for work tomorrow
• Will there be a job for them if the building has gone up in smoke, etc.

 

Consider issuing a help-line number for staff to call in or, depending on the scale and type of emergency, tannoy announcement, e-mail, intranet, poster in reception area / canteen, local radio or phone calls to all staff.

 

Remember – providing information quickly will stop rumors!

 

Decide on course of action

 

Decide what you need to do and produce an action plan. Use the critical function priority list and the business impact analysis to assist you.

• Communicate decision to staff and business partners
• Let staff and business partners know what you have decided to do.

 

Provide public information to maintain reputation and business

• Appoint a member of staff to act as your media representative. This person should be trained in media response techniques and be able to answer questions regarding the emergency and the business in general.
• Your media representative should work in collaboration with the emergency services media officer if possible.
• A holding statement could be pre-prepared for your business so you just have to ‘fill in the blanks’ at the time.
• Arrange a debrief
• After every emergency it is important to hold a debrief so that you can learn from it.
• Disseminate the lessons learnt to all concerned.

 

Review Womens Clothing Shop business continuity plan

Following an emergency you should review and amend your plan as necessary.

 

Key contact list

 

The list should be adapted to be relevant for your Womens Clothing Shop business. Consider including details of key employees, utilities, insurance company, suppliers, customers, key holder, Security Company, partner organizations, members of your response team, etc.

 

Test the Womens Clothing Shop business continuity plan

 

It is important that, once your plan is written, you test the procedures you have put in place.

 

Before a plan can be tested your staff needs to be familiar with the content of the plan and their role in the response and recovery. This can be done by reading through the plan together and discussing how you would apply it to a fictional scenario.

 

When you are confident that your staff needs to understand the plan and their part in it, you should test the plan by acting out a scenario.

 

The business continuity management process is a circular process; it is vital the planning does not end once the plan is written. It should be reviewed and tested to ensure it remains up to date and effective.

 

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