Case Study 1

At the point of writing this we are into Day 7

“No phones lines, no internet therefore no email. Without a Business Continuity Plan we would have been up that proverbial river without any form of propulsion” Glynn Humphreys Chairman

Humphreys are used to doing Business Continuity Planning for others but this week they were using their expertise for themselves. Due to much planning before such an event, (which turned out to be theft of telephone cable locally) Humphreys had in place a Business Continuity Plan with a chapter on the very subject. Business Manager, Mr Anderson said “It is often said that a plan is only any use once it is tested and boy have we been testing it this week”

So what did we do that kept our business operational?

Firstly, our Email hosting company forward all the company emails to a stand by, dedicated Cable Internet Account which uses a completely different cable source to our main provider. This also provided a limited internet connection for the company allowing us to  FTP scanned images to our clients. We also have Two different suppliers for our telephone lines. This was a godsend which meant that when the main cable went down it did not take all of our lines out in one go. By contacting the phone service providers Business Help lines (Numbers in the Business Continuity Folder) each of our “lost” lines were transferred to a mobile phone number insuring that no incoming calls were missed.

It has not been an easy week by any means as the two lines from 10 that were working were stand alone lines  in side offices and not transferable and one had to be unplugged to allow the PDQ machine to be used so we could take  money from our walk in Shredding customers.

We thought we had all bases covered then the franking machine ran out of funds, but more crawling under desks to unplug the data line and we managed to re charge the account.

The moral of the story is that a disaster may not be Flood or Fire, from the outside it looks like there is nothing wrong with our business but like a duck on a pond it looks calm but under the water it is paddling like the clappers.

The old adage of “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail” is so true.