Industry:
Manufacturing | Pharmaceuticals
Business Area:
Business Continuity Management | Continuous Evaluation Plan
The customer:
With a complex web of customers – hospitals and clinics, pharmacies and physicians, insurance brokers and store chains across the country – operations continuity is the lifeblood of this multi-billion revenue pharmaceutical distributor.
The necessity:
As continuity is far more than a business issue for the pharmaceuticals industry, the management being fully aware of the necessity of business continuity management, had already put in place a number of solutions to support resilience. To ensure effectiveness of the existing plans and preparations, the company decided to establish an integrated Business Continuity Management program at recurring time intervals.
The solution:
The project covered all business functions from Management and IT to Finance and Logistics. Furthermore, it required fully compliance not only with the international BC Standards and Best Practices but with a number of industry regulations requiring a higher level of sensitivity. The program is managed in a continous approach and includs among other, the following areas:
- Current BC Status Gap Analysis
- Risk Assessment & Management
- Contingency Strategies
- Contingencies & BC Plans upgrade
- BC Plan Effectiveness
- Personnel Awareness
- Exercising & Testing
The initial project included a review of the exisitng Disaster Recovery Plans and designation of the capability and acceptability of the various departments and teams to provide continuous operations in the event of a disaster. It also required an assessment of technical solutions, processes, procedures and resources in place to ensure redundancy of critical systems & operations, and provided alternate paths to operate in case of a failure (whether this was an IT related technology failure, a strike, a pandemic, an infrastructure problem, a physical disaster etc.).
Finally, a Corrective Actions Plan was prepared as part of the assessment and GAP analysis. This plan included personnel issues (such as training, roles & responsibilities etc.), updated versions of present plans, and (new or updated) procedures to support the introduced improvements.
This project is initiated on an annual basis to ensure true Business Continuity & incident response capabilities are always in place.
