Coronavirus (COVID-19) and Business Resiliency Planning for Your Organization and Suppliers

The outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 is a major concern for worldwide public health. An important consideration during such crises is the ability for companies to anticipate rapidly evolving responses and be prepared for business continuity contingencies. Disruption is increasing as Industry events and business travel are being cancelled to help curb the spread of the virus.

Is your organization prepared for the impact of office closures, reduced travel, and limited availability of conferences? More importantly, how prepared is your supply chain?

There’s no better time to review and evolve your company’s business continuity and resiliency plans and processes, with an emphasis on your supply chain and their ability to continue services and delivery essential to your operations and business activity.

What to consider

Get prepared by analyzing and planning your organization’s preparedness for:

• Production outages, delivery of materials.
• Reductions in workforce due to sickness, including the executive team.
• Multi-week office closures, including a robust and efficient remote working infrastructure and process to ensure employees can work and communicate effectively.
• The effect of cancelled industry events on the ability to market products and connect with customers.
• Financial implications for cash flow and funding.

It’s also vitally important to identify and prioritize your critical suppliers and employ tools including standardized self-assessments and third-party risk monitoring to identify issues and areas for improvement.

Where to start

Identify key roles within your company to coordinate during disruptive events. Build and evolve a business continuity and resiliency plan to deal with potential risks and threats such as those posed by pandemics as well as cyber threats. Investing time and effort into these projects will reduce business interruptions, minimize loss and damage, and ensure a competitive advantage even during a crisis.

Standardized self-assessments allow companies to work with their partners and vendors to assess any gaps and concerns for risks and failures. For example, the Prevalent Compliance Framework (PCF) assessment contains a business continuity aspect to quickly determine whether an organization has built a continuity plan with suitable minimum business requirements, contingency and recovery planning and testing, and impacts to the organization based on loss of staff and wider supply chain impact.

Organizations can also benefit from third-party risk monitoring services to continuously monitor vendor announcements and events that could impact their ability to respond effectively to change or create an opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of a weakness in the company’s defenses.

Next steps

For more information, check out Brenda Ferraro’s article How Third-Party Risk Management Can Ensure Supply Chain Resiliency in Times of Crisis.

Need help? Contact Prevalent today for a free, one-hour maturity assessment to quickly identify focus areas and recommendations and receive a prioritized roadmap of activities which provide the greatest improvements.