Few businesses have had to experience a serious disaster. But when it happens it can be catastrophic and could sink the business. Have you ever wondered what happened to all the businesses in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? The effects of a disaster, (natural or man-made) can be mitigated with a little advance planning. Even if you never experience such a disaster, the planning activity can be helpful in identifying weak points in your operations or staffing. Advance planning for a possible disaster or emergency can appear over-whelming. However, a little advance preparation can be powerful, and even life-saving, to a business. Lets break this task into simple steps.
1. Identify the types of disaster for which you want to be prepared. Don’t focus on the cause of the disaster, just imagine a consequence. For example, don’t think of a tornado, flood or earthquake; rather think in terms of loss of all power and communications; loss of a key piece of machinery; loss of all production capability for a period of time longer than a week; a serious quality problem that requires a complete shutdown or a recall of product. In certain industries a chemical spill or explosion can be very serious.
2. Identify the people most affected by this disaster. Usually this would be customers, employees and suppliers. There may be (depending on your industry) regulatory authorities or news media that you must notify. In the case of civil emergency or haz-mat authorities, you should record the telephone numbers of those personnel you must contact.
3. Look at the options for each situation and estimate the impact of each option in terms of the cost of implementation and potential loss if you do not take action. In many cases emergency management agencies can be a great resource to help you identify the impact. They may even have reaction plans available for you to add to your disaster response documentation.
4. Select the best option, list the tasks and assign responsibilities for completion of each task. Then assign a back-up for each task responsibility.
5. All of this work can be done in a conference room with senior staff. Now, each disaster scenario and remedial option should be tested for validity. Again, this test can be conducted in a conference room setting. You set the scenario and have each staff member verbally “walk-through” their response actions. Don’t accept any assumptions in this test. Each staff member should be able to explain how he would accomplish his task.
Document the final response solutions. Keep your disaster contingency planning book in multiple locations both on-site and off-site. It doesn’t do any good if the disaster contingency plan is destroyed in the disaster.
You can’t predict the type of, or timing of, a disaster. However, a little advance planning and thinking can reduce the financial pain from a disaster. It may even lead you to take proactive steps to avoid a disaster.
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