The Motorola Six Sigma Story – Birth of Six Sigma
No understanding of Six Sigma is complete without truly understanding where it came from – Motorola. The backdrop of the story shows how Six Sigma implementations changed the way Multi-National Corporations conducted operations worldwide. It started in 1981. Motorola like most American companies was reeling under the threat of Japanese competition. Recovering from World War-2, […]
What is Project Risk ?
What is Risk ? Having the best people execute the plan does not guarantee success. There are a host of external factors which may play a role in determining the outcome regarding whether a project has been successful or not. These are called Project risks. The formal definition of a risk is an event or […]
Why there are Fewer Women in the Workforce and what can be done to rectify this
The Benefits of Having More Women in the Workforce As most organisational and business experts agree, there is a business case to be made for Diversity and Inclusivity in terms of the enrichment of organisations where there are greater number of women and gender and racial minorities. Right from the variety of opinions that diversity […]
Master Data Management of an ERP System
ERP packages contain several modules, such as finance, sales and distribution, materials management, manufacturing and production control, human resources, plant maintenance and quality management. Main characteristics of ERP system is that all its modules function in an integrated manner. Due to integrated nature of functioning, a few master tables are referenced frequently all across the […]
Hammer and Champy’s View on Process
After the Japanese wave of business process management came the concept of Business Process Re-engineering which rocked the world of BPM. The idea of BPM and the resultant benefits have been mentioned below: What about Those Companies That Did Not Change As said earlier, the Japanese companies were able to understand the dimension of time […]
In the highly competitive world of business and marketing, Organizations are pushed to be ahead of the race and walk the talk. Customer and Market expectations are higher where in the Companies are expected to walk the talk and demonstrate their capability to live through the promises. In such situation, Organizations have had to think on terms of business contingency, Disaster Recovery and Business continuity plans for they cannot afford any disruption of supplies to markets and failing the customer on account of any risk or threat to their business on account of natural calamities, political situations, terrorism or any such perceived risks.
In fact in high value products especially those involving critical functions at the Customers end as well as those involving high end technology, customers expect the suppliers to demonstrate their capability and an operational plan of business disaster recovery in place so that their business does not suffer on account of disruption of services or failure at the Supplier’s end. Suppliers are often required to commit to having the disaster recovery plan in place as a part of the Supplier Contract.
Risk assessment, Disaster Recovery and Business contingency planning involves the entire Organization at all levels. First and foremost it is important to understand the kind of risk that the Business Contingency plan aims to cover. The plan aims to primarily cover the risk of disruption to Business Process, Risk of Life to employees, Management Control & Asset recovery.
Businesses face threats from several quarters. Some of the threats can be due to geographical location or natural disasters and havoc caused by the weather and other natural calamities. In such cases, man has very little or no control over the situation. Even amongst the Natural disasters and threats, there are two kinds of risks namely predictable and unpredictable. Unpredictable risks like floods, hurricane, fire and other such events can totally disrupt the business without giving anyone a chance to prepare for the same.
When we talk of manmade disasters, we are referring chiefly to acts of sabotage, terrorism, industrial espionage and attack, vandalism etc. Some of the companies prefer to include the supply failures due to supply chain network failure or supplier failure as a risk to the business and prepare contingency plan for the same.
Some of the companies which are highly dependent upon limited suppliers for their raw materials and in cases where raw material supplies are scarce and not freely available, the business contingency plan can cover these specifics as perceived risks too.
Similarly in technology and service sector companies, any disruption or threat to availability of skilled manpower required for the business process can also be covered under the risk making the business process unstable.
Events like wars, international sanctions, unstable political situations and strikes etc can also cause potential threat of disruption of business operations and supplies to the markets. The extent of the perceived threat and risk depends upon the particular country and the business.
Companies depending upon high end technologies, software and hardware run the risk of failures of the technology and systems thereby affecting the entire business process. The failure can be of the hardware or of the software. In certain other businesses, the critical machinery used in the manufacturing process can be under risk, thereby causing a threat to the supplies.
An analysis can go into minute level and identify a huge list of risks in the business. However the management needs to take a judicious call to filter out from the list of risks those that need to be covered essentially for, it becomes impossible to build a recovery plan around all of the risks that can be identified.
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