PREP: Value Chain - Climate Change Resilience

Leading companies from the food and beverage, insurance, investment, technology, and energy industries have jointly released a guide to climate change resiliency planning. ‘PREP Value Chain Climate Resilience’ includes a step-by-step tool, Business ADAPT, for businesses to assess and prepare for the risks and opportunities posed by climate change.

The Business ADAPT tool provides five simple steps to help companies understand and act on the climate related risks that they face.

The steps are targeted towards company executives and senior managers, and provide detailed guidance in sectors that are considered highly vulnerable including water and energy utilities and companies in the food, beverage, agriculture and general manufacturing industries.

The five steps are:

1. Analyze the issues - Have you started thinking about the resilience of your business in the face of climate-related impacts?
2. Develop an internal strategy - Have you mobilized the right team to address climate resilience?
3. Assess risks and opportunities - Have you taken steps to assess the areas where opportunities to build climate resilience or invest in emerging market opportunities exist in your business value chain?
4. Prioritize actions - Have you taken steps to identify and assess measures to build climate resilience in your value chain?
5. Tackle actions, and evaluate progress - How will you successfully implement actions to build climate resilience in your value chain, and evaluate and monitor the effect of your actions over time?

PREP Value Chain Climate Resilience has been written by The Partnership for Resilience and Environmental Preparedness.

PREP is a one-year pilot partnership formed to address the risks and opportunities that climate change impacts pose to businesses and the communities on which they depend.

Members include Calvert Investments, Earth Networks, Entergy, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc., Levi Strauss and Co., Starbucks and Swiss Re. BSR and Ceres are also partners. Oxfam America serves as PREP's secretariat.

The firm Acclimatise served as lead authors of the report.

Read PREP Value Chain Climate Resilience.

‘Business Continuity Manager’ software enters the market

LockPath, a provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) applications, has announced the launch of ‘Business Continuity Manager’.

The tool, part of Keylight 2.4, the latest version of the company’s GRC platform, enables organizations to manage business continuity in a simple and effective way, empowering them to create unified business continuity strategies.

Leveraging the flexibility of the Keylight platform, Business Continuity Manager lets businesses create custom business continuity plans, manage the associated risks and minimize potential losses.

Unlike traditional GRC tools, Business Continuity Manager provides common forms for business continuity right out of the box and lets customers use any standard web browser to quickly match Keylight to the company’s distinct business continuity processes and needs.

Key features of Business Continuity Manager include:

• Business impact analysis: Through detailed analysis, users can easily organize complex information, determine the impacts of a loss, and prioritize the recovery function of multiple business components.
• Business continuity plans: Users can leverage pre-built forms, workflows and notifications to quickly build a business continuity plan or create a fully customized plan down to individual fields, field types, field visibility and forms.
• Teams and contacts: The tool enables the appointment of a team leader, identification of a team of essential personnel, and definition of critical vendors so if a disaster occurs, users can immediately locate them and make contact.
• Tabletop exercises: To ensure a plan will be effective, Business Continuity Manager supports exercises to test a plan against a simulated situation and collect valuable information about its application.
• Assessments: Users can launch business continuity plan assessments or tabletop exercises and create reports to gather valuable insight about the plan and its execution.
• Workflow: Custom workflows allow a simplified review of plans and exercises by appropriate experts across the organization. Users can create a custom set of stages that the document will be routed through based on certain criteria.
• Document management: Users can easily export business continuity plan content with all supporting documents (Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Visio files) into one comprehensive Adobe PDF document.
• Extensibility: Users can add lookup references to policies, controls and resources in other Keylight application records to enhance their organization’s ability to proactively prepare for and react to events.

Risk and Business Continuity - Managing for the unknown

Do you have the right team in place to face a future filled with Unknown Risks?

While the perilous unknown may be the stuff of sci-fi and doomsday movies, the potential for more mundane or fiscal danger is always around us.

This should not provoke paranoia but rather a healthy sense of vigilance as well as skepticism. Executives need to be vigilant about what could happen next. By all means consider pandemics, earthquakes and wars, but also be skeptical about their effects on their organisations.

For example, if financial executives had been more vigilant and skeptical prior to the fiscal meltdown of 2008 some businesses may not have found their institutions so over-leveraged.

Clearly, we say this from the moral high ground of Hindsight, which is always 20/20.

So what is a savvy executive to do? Three questions come to mind.

What is the worst that could happen to us?
This question prompts many scenarios from a natural disaster to a market crash, or even the entry of a significant new competitor who changes the balance in the market place. What happens then? Executives need to keep their antennae up and do their Risk Assessments and sound Business Continuity Planning.

How would we react?
Very often companies do have BC or disaster plans but are they robust and up to date? Do they stipulate what happens when resources are not available or executives and employees are separated from each other?

Do we have the right people in place to recover?
This is perhaps the most important question. Very often members of a leadership team are equipped to manage when the going is good, but what happens when the bad gets into fear and panic?

The senior leader must ask if these people have the right mindset to adapt to evolving and changing circumstances.

Flexibility becomes an imperative, but so too does resilience. You need leaders who can cope with setback and maintain the discipline to persevere.

Big questions provoke big picture thinking. Very often such questions will cause real unease, or at least a sense of disruption and that is healthy.

If a catastrophe strikes disruption will be significant. So what will you do to survive?

New translations of business continuity Good Practice Guidelines published

The Good Practice Guidelines were written by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) to provide business continuity managers, consultants, auditors and regulators with ‘a working knowledge of the rationale for BCM and its basic principles’.

The latest version, GPG 2010, has been available as English, Portuguese and Italian versions; and now the BCI has added Spanish, Japanese and German translations to the collection. Translations into French, Chinese, Greek and Korean are also underway.

BCI members can obtain PDF copies of the Good Practice Guidelines free of charge and they are available to non-members for £19.95 /€22.95 or $29.95.

More details.

BCI updates business continuity dictionary

The Business Continuity Institute has published an update (Version 2) of its Dictionary of Business Continuity Management Terms. Edited by Lyndon Bird, the dictionary provides a comprehensive glossary of business continuity terms.

Definitions given in the glossary include terms from the BCI’s GPG2010 and the BS 25999 standard, with some additional comments in some cases ‘to improve clarity and understanding’.

Other definitions are consolidated definitions from various source documents.

View the Dictionary of Business Continuity Management Terms Version as a PDF.