Food & Drink Importer
The Client
This highly successful specialist food & drink importer and distributor is a key supplier to all the major UK supermarkets, wholesalers and specialist food outlets and has established relationships with well known European brands going back over 20 years. The company is privately owned and still managed by two of the founding directors who were seeking a high quality of service and deliverables at a very competitive price.
The Challenge
The majority of the company workforce is based on a single site as are all of the supporting IT systems. The company runs a single small warehouse facility but outsources the bulk of its warehousing and distribution to a number of third party logistics providers.
The Directors were seeking an end to end review of all their business continuity exposures, identification of cost effective mitigation strategies, the creation of a comprehensive and flexible business continuity plan and design and facilitation of an exercise to rehearse their incident management team and response to a number of evolving scenarios.
The business continuity plan would have to recognise and address the key dependencies to third party suppliers as well as the internal exposures to IT, premises and the in-house warehousing facility.
The Solution
In a relatively small owner managed business, the chain of command is short and access to all the key individuals was easy to organise. The Teed consultants recognised that, in these circumstances, a fast-track approach could be adopted to condense the key part of the project (Business Impact Analysis) into two days by utilising workshop sessions more effectively, saving the client’s managers time and eliminating unnecessary cost.
Based on the output from the Business Impact Analysis, Teed were able to prioritise the issues that needed the most urgent attention and propose cost effective mitigation strategies centering on the need for offsite systems, justify the need for a specified number of seats at a recovery location and recommend an in-depth review of supply chain continuity.
The Result
A Business Continuity Plan was developed within six weeks of project commencement which addressed all the client’s initial requirements.
The client was delighted with the Plan, related documentation and templates produced, enabling them to take forward the further development of their Business Continuity Programme internally.