Solid Height - Spring Manufacturers Institute

Bird Flu Pandemic
Protect your company from this
and other potential disasters
Your business will be hit with a flu pandemic that
puts a third of your work force out of commission
for three weeks. Your revenues will drop by 10
percent; the GDP will dip by five percent; and the
American economy will be the recipient of a $200
billion haircut.
On the other hand, none of that may happen.
Confused? Welcome to the club. Health professionals
everywhere are trying to forecast
the next move of a certain avian
flu strain known to insiders
as “H5N1.” This strain has
distinguished itself from the runof-the-mill
flu we get every winter
for two reasons: First, it has killed
a large number of domestic birds
in Asia and Europe. Second, more
than 120 people, many of them
young and vigorous, who have
contracted the virus have died.
So far, humans have only
gotten sick through contact with
domestic birds, such as chickens.
That’s good, but conditions may change. “We are
looking closely at H5N1 because there is a potential
for it to become a pandemic strain if it starts to move
between humans,” says Dan Rutz, a spokesperson at
the Center for Disease Control, based in Washington,
D.C. “The biggest problem is that we just don’t know
if or when that will actually happen.”
Plan Your Response
A possible bird flu pandemic, then, is one more
item to add to the unhappy list of disasters that can
Phillip M. Perry is an award-winning
journalist specializing in the fields of business
management and law. Over the past
20 years, his byline has appeared more than
3,000 times in publications such as World
Trade, Business, Corporate Risk Management,
Human Resource Executive and The Legal
Times of Washington. Readers may contact
him by fax at (212) 226-5580 or e-mail at
phil@pmperry.com.
Checkpoint
Business Tips
From Phil Perry
lay waste to the best of operations. (For a detailed
report on the expected effect of a pandemic on
businesses, visit the Web site for the Congressional
Budget Office at www.cbo.gov.) Given the possibility
of a severe disruption to your own business, now is
a good time to formulate plans that will help you
recover after a devastating event.
“Disaster planning is essential for a couple of
reasons,” offers Hale Foote, president
of Scandic Springs Inc., San
Leandro, CA. “First, for the continued
health of your business, you
have to anticipate interruptions.
Second, today’s customer demands
it.” That second reason has become
more important with the modern
emphasis on just-in-time delivery.
The global supply chain has
thinned over the past five years,
explains Foote, and the trend has
accelerated in the past couple of years.
“No longer do customers keep 30- and
60-day inventories. Our own customers
pull from us daily.” The upshot: If you don’t ship
because your company has been hit by a disaster,
your customers will be on the phone saying they
need parts. If you don’t have them, you risk losing
customers to companies that do.
Disaster recovery planning, then, is essential not
only in light of the possible flu pandemic but also
for survival following any other production-halting
disaster. Several years ago, Scandic started planning
for business continuity in case of a disabling event
such as fire, flood, windstorm or earthquake – that
last one being of special interest to any Californiabased
organization. Scandic had already seismically
retrofitted its buildings, but realized it needed to do
more. For example, the company now performs a
nightly off-site tape backup of all computer data, and
maintains an off-site parallel server, loaded with all
applications and ready to plug in and go.
That kind of protection of buildings and data
can go a long way toward ameliorating the effects
of a disaster. In the specific case of a pandemic, of
SPRINGS July 2006 45