Best Practice

Sprint Reply business continuity management

Business Continuity Management is a company-wide approach designed to ensure that critical business processes can be maintained in the event of a major internal or external incident.

Keep running

Keeping business running even when facing major disruptions is possible if an organization is sufficiently prepared. Recent events in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic have made us aware of this simple truth once again.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a company-wide approach designed to ensure that critical business processes can be maintained in the event of a major internal or external incident. It allows for a rapid response to protect employees, to keep customer and company assets safe and to assess financials and operations in a quick and focused manner. Business Continuity Management enables organizations to fulfil obligations to customers and regulators and provides for fast recovery when resuming operations.

Sprint Reply solutions

Sprint Reply offers a portfolio of solutions, which understand and implement technical systems & infrastructure requirements to support recovery.

The basic steps during recovery involve identifying the business critical processes and key resources, making sure the resources are well equipped and have the necessary accesses and VPN’s enabled while working remotely, and if necessary transporting equipment when required. The recovery plan takes a proactive approach with pre-existing measures already in place, such as impact analysis of infrastructure changes, and devises a plan accordingly so that there is no hindrance to operations.

Sprint Reply BCM

Sprint Reply supports their clients in maintaining a comprehensive Business Continuity Program that corresponds to their individual business environment.

The programme takes a number of regulatory, governmental and industry standards and guidelines into account to ensure compliance with all applicable requirements.

These include but are not limited to ISO 22301 & ISO 22313, the Business Continuity Institute’s Good Practice Guidelines, and the UK Civil Contingencies Act. Sprint Reply strengthens operational resilience by following a systematic and sustainable BCM lifecycle approach. (graph 1)

The BCM governance structure guarantees that recovery plans are documented, reviewed and tested. Sprint Reply provides this solid foundation for the BCM Framework.

Key elements of the BCM framework are tools to direct recovery activities during business disruption and to document procedures to back up and recover critical systems and data.

The framework further provides documented strategies to sustain critical functions. It defines processes to communicate with key stakeholders, including employees and clients. Audits and risk assessments help to always be aware of the actual compliance status and to define areas requiring acute attention.

Graph 1: Business Continuity Management life cycle

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From understanding to mitigating risks

To deliver a reliable BCM Framework, tailored to the individual business’s needs,
Sprint Reply conducts an in-depth assessment focusing on four key questions:

What is the financial impact, if a process was disrupted?

What are the regulatory requirements that would be affected?

What is the reputational risk implied?

How does the BCM support the overall company strategy?

Answering these questions requires a thorough assessment of all critical points along the value chain. Following common best practices and conducting financial and high-level analysis, helps determine the potential impact of disruptions to the business. The core processes undergo a detailed business and process relationship analysis using process mining, process automation consulting and diagnosis of related IT Systems and Interfaces. Mapping process ownership across all stakeholders including contractors and suppliers helps in creating awareness for the interdependencies that could turn out to be weaknesses.

The ultimate goal of the analysis is to gain a clear view of the current risk landscape and define a clear and actionable risk mitigation strategy.

This especially includes – next to classical risk management – the definition of a technology solution, which may support the maintenance of business operations. Robotic or Intelligent Process Automation reduces the dependence on human workforce availability whereas the (re)design of IT Systems can help to enable new forms of work, like remote working and collaboration based on cloud services.

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Sprint Reply is the specialist in strategic consulting, innovation and digital transformation. We support large and medium-sized companies in all industries in the development of new and digital business opportunities. We are your partner for your current and future digital challenges. With our implementation-oriented approach, we help our customers to become digital pioneers in their respective industries.