Bottled Water Producer
The Client
Our client is one of the world’s top 20 bottled water companies and a leading player in the UK soft drinks market. With a turnover of £100 million, the organisation is also a major exporter selling in over 30 countries worldwide.
The initiative was driven by the insurers who recognised that an incident could result in a significant business interruption claim. They were keen to reduce their exposure through effective business continuity planning.
Reputation of the brand is paramount and senior management were aware that if they were found wanting in a crisis situation, this could have damaging consequences for the organisation.
The Challenge
The client already had a reasonable level of awareness and preparedness internally with response plans for sites and specific contingencies. These did not necessarily address resource loss type scenarios as a whole and further investigation showed gaps against many threats that could impact logistics, distribution, transport, manufacturing, water resource, the environment and equipment, for example.
Potential impacts to brand reputation also had to be built into the process, from analysis to exercising of the senior management team. It was important to focus the business continuity objectives around protecting the brand as well as production operations. Management needed to understand the level of risk to make informed decisions, where to invest in appropriate controls and where to accept risks.
The Solution
Innovative solutions were required given the number of feasible worst case scenarios. David Teed facilitated discussions with key individuals to consider the implications of a range of disruptive events and the potential options for recovery using unaffected capabilities onsite or elsewhere.
It was important to acknowledge that scenarios such as the partial loss of site, loss of key equipment or water resource, could have a significant impact on production. Ultimately it was preferable to stay on site rather than move operations to alternative locations. Therefore, it was necessary to ensure each site has resilience and appropriate contingencies for specific resource loss events.
Discussions identified a number of business continuity pre-incident actions that could also help instill business efficiencies, for example, a mothballed plant could provide day-to-day benefits if resurrected, as well as providing an alternative recovery facility.
The Result
Teed developed a multi-faceted business continuity plan that is designed to enable the company to respond not just to the loss of one building and its contents and infrastructure as is typical, but also to cope with various resource loss type scenarios. Strategies and contingencies were developed to deal with events that are more likely to happen than worst case crises level incidents.
A plan of action is now in place to reduce the risk exposure, with many of the pre-incident improvement actions built into the longer term business strategy. At the end of the project, a business continuity exercise was held to validate plans and recovery strategies. Feedback from senior management who took part in the exercise showed the value of the project:
“It was good to get people thinking about BC and the impacts (short and long term) on the business”
“Highlighted some key points for improvement; raised awareness of process and critical issues; was taken seriously by all; covered all stakeholder and brand protection”
The organisation as a whole can be more confident of its current preparedness and has the information required to improve upon this over time.
In bringing Teed’s specialist input and experience to this project, the client was able to improve its resilience, use existing capabilities wisely and satisfy its insurers and stakeholders of its ability to maintain both production and reputation in the event of an adverse situation.