Business Continuity Planning ‹ Technical Risk Services

Recent occurrences have heightened the need to develop a strategy for dealing with the possible interruption of business due to natural and man-made disasters such as fire, weather, hazardous materials incidents and technological emergencies, and a pandemic outbreak. Maintaining the continuity of essential services is an obligation that must be upheld even if critical resources are unavailable as a result of an internal or external emergency event. Unfortunately, between 85% – 90% of small to mid-sized organizations do not have a business recovery plan, and as such are unprepared to deal with a disaster or catastrophe. Insurers, lenders, shareholders, auditors, customers, and the public, are putting more pressure on organizations to have plans in place in the face of these emerging threats.

Flexible Solutions for Your Business Needs

While many businesses see value in developing a Business Continuity Plan, combination of staff time commitments, the complexity of the project and lack of experience often means that this critical document that may control a company’s future may never be completed. TRS assists by facilitating discussions in order to minimize employee time commitments supplying the necessary expertise to get the job done correctly.

Our goal is to help organizations prepare plans that enable them to restore critical business processes until the situation returns to normal. Developing a Business Continuity Plan (BCP) can be an overwhelming and complex task, however, TRS provides a straightforward and structured approach to fast track the development process. We have developed a Business Recovery Audit & Planning Guide which contains flexible templates to help business create a comprehensive, site-specific business continuity plan. The audit & planning guide helps companies assess their exposures to loss and develop a custom plan for their operations to help reduce or eliminate risk. The guide contains a series of pertinent questions regarding the business and rates the degree of compliance. We provide training and orientation to management and BCP steering committee members that covers, in detail, the steps required to complete the process. Working closely with key staff members, we take on the role of facilitator and coach and supply all of the tools necessary to complete the process. The extent of our involvement can be customized to suit the individual needs of the organization, and may include the following steps:

Perform a risk and vulnerability assessment
Complete a business impact analysis
Develop strategies for the continuity of all critical business processes
Compile necessary documentation
Organize and develop written plans
Test and maintain the plan

Using TRS’ streamlined approach has proven to be successful and results in the following benefits to our clients:

Development of a plan within a tight timeline
Avoidance of steep learning curve causing excessive delays and wasted time of internal resources
Minimization of valuable internal resource time
Sharing of business continuity strategies and solutions developed for other organizations
Potential reduction in the size of the business interruption loss (time and money) in order to get business back to its pre-loss state
Mitigates the risk of liability that organizations face by not having a plan. All organizations with a board of directors face potential Director and Officer liability claims if they fail to ensure that their organization has a recovery plan
Identifies the impact of natural disasters which are becoming more frequent, severe and unpredictable
Minimizes the rising concern over terrorist acts, a situation which creates total chaos
Reduces the likelihood of business failure, following a business interruption. Statistics have shown that over 65% of businesses fail within 18 months of a significant interruption
Provides a sound strategy to offset the possibility that insurance will not cover the total loss resulting from business interruption. Even with excellent coverages, uninsured losses may represent 35% or more of the total loss and the goal here would be to plan for these situations