The business benefits of planning
This section describes some of the business benefits of business continuity planning.
Why prepare for emergencies?
Because it makes real business sense. Emergencies can disrupt businesses, affecting profits and operations. This is bad for employees, shareholders, customers and communities.
The Government's key advice to businesses is to ensure you have robust, flexible business continuity management that will ensure that the impact of any emergency on your business will be minimised, and should help your business recover quickly.
It makes sense to put in place Business Continuity Management arrangements because they help to:
- Develop a clearer understanding of how the organisation works. To ensure the continuity of an organisation, you first have to understand how it works. The process of analysing the business can yield sources of increased operational effectiveness and efficiency.
- Protect the business, and ensure that your business can help others in an emergency. Business Continuity Management will help ensure that the impact of emergencies on the day-to-day functions of the business is kept to a minimum, and that disruption to your critical business operations does not deepen the impact of the emergency on your employees, share-holders, partners, contractors, stakeholders and customers.
- Protect the reputation of the business. Customers expect continuity of services, even in the most challenging of circumstances. They expect you to be fully in control, and to be seen to be in control - your organisation's reputation is at risk if you are not.
- Produce clear cost benefits. Identifying, preventing and managing disruptions in advance can reduce the costs to an organisation in terms of financial expenditure and management time. The demands of the insurance market have also increasingly become an important driver.
- Ensure compliance and corporate governance. Many organisations are - to varying degrees - subject to performance standards, corporate governance requirements and in some cases specific requirements to do Business Continuity Management. There are also linkages between good business continuity planning and good management of health and safety issues. Establishing business continuity arrangements will help ensure compliance with this wider framework of responsibilities and expectations.
This may seem daunting. But the Government believes in proportionate planning. Businesses shouldn't try to plan for every possible emergency. Business Continuity Planning should in the first instance be generic, rather than focusing on every single possible emergency (such as terrorism or flu pandemic). Just as Government maintains generic plans and capabilities focused on possible impacts of different types of disruptive challenges, so we advice business to focus first on the possible impacts of an emergency (eg. absence from work, temporary loss of premises or power etc.).
More information
- The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) Business Continuity Survey 2006 Report [PDF 539KB, 16 pages]. The CMI's survey report, which was supported this year by the Cabinet Office and Continuity Forum, emphasises some of the key business benefits of BCM. It shows that those with plans really believe that they make a difference and reduce disruption. And it shows that a vast majority of businesses have suffered some form of disruption over the last year.
- You can get more information, including more links, answers to frequently asked questions, and a glossary of terms, by going to the More Information section of the website.
- You can get more information about other civil protection topics on the UK Resilience website [External website].
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