What is Business Continuity Planning?

A proactive planning process to ensure that critical services or products are delivered during a disruption. Critical services or products delivered to: 

• Ensure survival
• Avoid causing injury
• Meet legal or other obligations of a business.

To permit an organization to recover its facility, data and assets, a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) includes the following:

• Plans
• Measures
• Arrangements
• Identification of necessary resources (including personnel, information, equipment, financial allocations, legal counsel, infrastructure protection and accommodations)

Benefits of a Business Continuity Plan
While some companies have developed contingency plans, most have not. This lack of preparedness not only threatens the viability of sectors in Canada, but, as in the case of manufacturing, also jeopardizes the delivery of critical goods that depend on complex supply chain systems.

Creating and maintaining a BCP helps ensure that your business has the resources and information needed to deal with an emergency. Other benefits include:

• Enhance your business image with employees, shareholders and customers by demonstrating a proactive attitude.
• Improve efficiency in the overall organization.
• Identify the relationship of assets both human and financial resources with respect to critical services and deliverables.

Key Steps of Business Continuity Planning

	Establish an emergency preparedness team
	Identify essential services/functions
	Identify required skill sets and staff reallocation
	Identify potential issues
	Prepare a plan for each essential service/function
	Compare with the "Preparedness Checklist"
	Review with the corporate steering committee
	Revise, test the plan and update as required