Its never too late to plan for business interruptions.
In South Yorkshire we have seen businesses affected by all manner of interruptions over the last two years. Have you been one of the lucky ones or have you already been affected? Don’t think because you have had one incident that it won’t happen again.
How quickly could your business recover from a cyber attack or your premises flooding? What happens when a flu outbreak affects your staff? Many businesses take out insurance against disruptions to business, but we know that on many occasions by the time insurance money is paid out, the business has ceased trading.
A good business continuity plan can help you in a crisis!
How might our businesses be interrupted?
There are many disruptions that can affect your business. These include but are not limited to:
- Fire, flooding, cold weather and snow
- Power outages, loss of utilities and cyber attacks
- Industrial action, heatwaves and storms
- Terrorist attacks and pandemic outbreaks
A business continuity plan, may provide you with some reassurance about how you and your employees will react at the time of an incident. It might not save your business, but it will at least give you some advantage over those who haven’t planned at all.
Where do you start?
There are many places where you can seek advice about business continuity planning, and links are provided at the bottom of this page to help you.
If you do nothing else then you should consider completing a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) to identify your critical activities and which people, places, and processes are critical to the continuance of those activities.
There are many ways of completing a BIA. The type of business you carry out and the size of your business may determine the style of BIA which you utilise. There are many free BIA templates and examples available on the internet.
If you would like to take your BCP a stage further then you may wish to consider the use of a BCP software solution such as the ROBUST Resilient Business Software Toolkit. You can find about more about this here. There are also many other BCP software solutions available on the market which may be suitable for your business.
South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue (SYFR) neither endorses nor guarantees the accuracy of products or services offered or sold and will not be responsible for any transactions you make.
Third Party Content
We support the South Yorkshire Local Authorities who operate schemes and promotions to assist businesses with business continuity preparedness.
For further advice please contact SYFR Resilience, Planning and Contingencies on 0114 253 2457 or 0114 253 2246.
If you are a business and would like further information please click on the below links:
- Doncaster Met Borough Council – Business Continuity Management
- Sheffield City Council – Prepare your business for an emergency
- Barnsley Met Borough Council – Keeping your business running
- Rotherham Met Borough Council – Preparing your business
- Central Government – Resilience in society: infrastructure, communities and businesses
- Business Continuity Institute – BCI Knowledge Bank
- Business Resilience Health Check – Health Check
- Humber Emergency Planning Service – Lets get ready for an emergency
If you would like to see what we do in relation to business continuity planning for our organisation, please click here.