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Improving Business
Continuity
By Henry Martinez
When one considers business
continuity, the point of
reference is often from the
outside-in. The focus is
generally on what it takes to keep one’s own
business operations running by assessing
the risks and the appropriate investment to
mitigate the risk.
However, when considering the end-user’s
point of view, the concept of business
continuity changes. From this vantage point,
each company in the supply chain is “doing
business.” This means from the raw material
providers through the manufacturers to
the distributors and retailers to the enduser,
everyone is a link in the supply chain.
Furthermore, many of these businesses rely
on common services like trucking, banking,
and telecommunications. The ease of an
Internet transaction may hide the bricksand-mortar
infrastructure that makes the
world turn, but it is all still there.
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Raw
Materials
Consider the example of a simple electronic
commodity—the mobile phone—on
which some of you might be reading this
article. It was likely manufactured overseas
under contract to a large brand name device
company, then transported and staged for
the carrier, by a transportation and logistics
company, at multiple distribution outlets
for sale (either over the counter or via the
internet).
In order for the end-user to “do business,”
all of the links in that supply chain must
work. If any link fails, the phone will not be
delivered to the retail outlet, or the website
will indicate the product is out of stock,
meaning the consumers will continue
shopping elsewhere. The substantial
telecom infrastructure that binds the
device to the cellular communications
system in order to deliver the telephone
and data services is not even considered in
this scenario.
Mfg
Distri- -
bution
Tranportation and Logistics
Banking / Financial
Utility Communications
Imagine your link (i.e., your business) in
that supply chain breaking during the rollout
of a new mobile phone! Many high
availability/disaster recovery articles deal
with the cost of downtime from an internal
perspective. However, consider the cost
to a transportation and logistics company
having a significant business outage and
therefore unable to deliver the mobile
phones to the retail centers. This would
result in stunted sales and maybe worse—
bad publicity! Not only would there be
a loss due to failure to meet service level
agreements, but also potential loss of future
business and the reaction in the stock
markets (for publicly traded companies).
Retail
TORONTO USERS GROUP for Power Systems – January 2010