The recent announcement by Amcor of the permanent closure of their Livingstone facility with a loss of 77 jobs highlights the potentially disastrous consequences of a fire in a print facility. If this was an isolated incident then it could possibly be accepted as an unfortunate consequence of commercial life.
However, fires of this nature are for from infrequent in the packaging conversion business. Furthermore, they are not the only risk and last year we says converters being affected by the heavy snow fall.
Whilst as suppliers we can all resolve to be more vigilant; but what potential steps should we take to mitigate these problems? Fortunately help is at hand.
Whilst none of use can hope to eliminate the damages caused by fire, flood, pestilence, or plague, we can all have a Disaster Recovery or Business Continuity Plan (D.R.B.C.P) in place to minimise the effects which these disasters would inflict on our business. The disaster in question does not need to be a total wipe-out, even a few days or a week without being able to deliver or receive material.
As a consequence DRBCP was born. At its heart is;
Stage 1 – Risk Analysis:
All of us who supply the food industry are very familiar with the concept of risk assessment, but these exercises can still be on eye opener, particularly when considering risks created by third party failure. Having a unique product or source of supply is a great selling tool until the day that special material is not available. Many companies have developed single sourcing of packaging as they believe it gives them greater buying power, it may do, until the day when the “source” is no longer there.
Stage 2 – Disaster Recovery Manager:
The appointment of a senior manager to coordinate and lead the disaster recovery is imperative. His/Her brief is to ensure the DRBCP is implemented quickly and effectively, ensure every item of expenditure is documented and keep all stakeholders up to date.
Stage 3 – Disaster Recovery Team:
Another imperative is the appointment of a senior manager for each and every activity in the business to lead their recovery team. A dedicated team of people is allocated to support each manager to enable implementation of the plan in each business area.
Stage 4 – Time Lines & Targets:
The disaster recovery manager and team leaders agree timelines and targets for each of the business areas to return to normality.
Ideally team leaders and the recovery manager will build regular update meetings into the time lines so all involved know when and where coordination will occur.
Operational Recovery:
Inevitably, whatever the scale of the disaster, different parts of the business will be up and running at different times. The DRBCP will maintain the emergency procedures in place until all activities in the business can be operated normally.
The whole process of the DRBCP relies heavily on preparation, planning, coordination, and most of all training. At National Flexible we have in place reciprocal agreements with like minded competitor companies.
We are also coordinating our key suppliers, developing contingency plans with them to cope with as many eventualities as we can.
In summary whilst we never ever want to test the DRBCP for real, we believe we have done the best we can to “Be Prepared”. As always we have a “Duty of Care” to our customers who by checking our DRBCP can demonstrate they have applied the test of “due diligence” to their customers. In summary the whole programme is so much more real than the box ticking exercise, so beloved by so many QA departments.
Barry Twigg is chief executive of National Flexible.
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