Ultimate BIA with "No Building, No People, No Systems, No Suppliers"

There are many levels of complexity to all incidents, often making the task of planning for their impact feel extremely overwhelming. Fires start small but can grow and spread; tornadoes might cause minor damage to a warehouse or take out an entire structure; one employee gets sick with the flu and suddenly your shipping department is down by a third and orders are late going out.

So, how can you plan for every potential incident that could impact your business? This question may seem complex, but the answer is simple: you don’t!

Real Life Scenario

While recently discussing this issue, a friend of ours shared a compelling example that perfectly illustrated this simple solution. This friend works for a natural gas company, and their story goes like this:

During a bad thunderstorm, an electrical tower was struck by lightning. The good news was that the tower had a ground wire. The bad news, however, was that the ground wire ran adjacent to the end of a metal corrugated sewer pipe. The surge from the lightning strike ran down into the ground wire, hit the sewer pipe, and then conducted along the length of the pipe until it hit a natural gas pipeline at the other end. This caused a minor explosion that triggered a chain reaction to all natural gas feeds in homes and businesses in the nearby vicinity. Luckily, the gas company was able to respond quickly and effectively. There was no further damage, and no one was hurt.

Considering this chain of events, do you think it was actually possible for someone to have predicted that scenario? Of course not!

Ultimate BIA - No Building, No People, No Systems, No Suppliers

What we learned from our friends at the natural gas company is that focusing on all the possible ways an incident might occur gets you nowhere, but thinking about what those incidents might affect is what ensures your preparedness.

At the end of the day, no matter what type of incident you experience it will have an impact on one (or a combination) of these four things:

1. Access to your workspace (No Building)
2. Loss of workforce (No People)
3. Access to technology (No Systems)
4. Supply chain disruptions (No Suppliers)

We like to call this the "No Building, No People, No Systems, No Suppliers" model. In the event of an incident, what would you do if you couldn’t access your building? Could your operations survive if 35% of your team has the flu? Would you be able to conduct critical business processes if you no longer had access to any technological systems? What happens to your business if one of your suppliers experiences an incident?

Whether you are building a brand-new Business Continuity Plan (BCP) or simply updating a pre-existing one, your BCP should be designed to support the decisions and strategies your organization will implement given an interruption. Taking a broader approach to assess how you would address these four key impacts throughout recovery can lessen the burden of planning, providing a solid foundation for your plan and instilling confidence in your preparedness.

The Ultimate BIA is just one example of our KISSBCP approach: KingsBridge Is Simple & Secure Business Continuity Planning. Want to learn more about KingsBridge and our reliable and cost-effective BCP services and software solutions? Contact us here or explore our website!