Liquified Natural Gas Producer

The Challenge

Recognising the value of business continuity (BC) to help maintain security of supply, the organisation already has a mature business continuity management system (BCMS) in place. The client wished to implement a BC planning tool and needed to understand beforehand whether existing business impact analysis (BIA) and BC plan information was where it should be, by subjecting it to an independent, external BC review.

Their search for a consultant with extensive oil and gas industry experience led them to Teed whose consultants have been working with clients with similar facilities and services, facing comparable risks and challenges, since 2001.

The BC review had to be achieved within a tight timescale of three months to maintain currency of the information prior to tool deployment. The size of the task was made clear by the quantity of documents to be reviewed, discussions facilitated and the review written up in that time.

The Solution

The BIAs outlined hundreds of critical activities to be assessed, leading to 29 discussions across the business. Together with a desktop review of 43 documents, including corporate BC and organisation documents, departmental BC plans and response documents, BIAs, IT, information security, risk and exercising documents. The agenda for discussions included:

1. Consider critical activities, resource dependencies and recovery timelines identified during previous BIAs
2. Obtain views on risks, threats, and potential single points of failure
3. Explore feasibility of contingencies and workarounds
4. Understand potential impacts in the event of defined worst-case scenarios, taking account of risk mitigation, response capabilities and recovery strategies
5. Identify any practical measures that could be taken to improve upon the current position, processes, and documents

Focused discussions were held with relevant areas, (for example, production, shipping, commercial, security, facilities, HSE), to tease out threats that needed further consideration, thereby determining strategies, contingencies and workarounds that were feasible in event of incidents causing reduced resource availability.

There were day-to-day benefits for the organisation as where single points of failure and improved recovery / response actions were identified, the business could implement the necessary improvements to keep potential incident impacts within acceptable levels and build organisational resilience.

The Result

Teed’s consultant delivered the BCMS Review Findings Report within the timeframe specified, together with detailed project discussion notes. The report covered:

1. The client’s current BC preparedness
2. Identified improvement actions categorised by their level of importance for BC preparedness (5 x High; 10 x Moderate; 21 x Lower), split into the following categories:
- Risk mitigation
- BIA
- BC strategies
- Exercising
- Training & awareness
- Governance
- Miscellaneous
3. Roadmap for taking forward BC improvement activities

One of the biggest threats highlighted was the potential for an incident causing a disruption to the transport of fluids to and from the production facilities, largely due to the risks associated with its geographical location. In addition, it was identified that the threats relating to the complex industrial processes at the plant would benefit from further analysis. A resulting recommendation was for the client to widen the scope of their BCMS to effectively link in with operational capabilities and risks, including production of an Operations BC plan and associated risk matrix for a range of operations-related resource loss scenarios.

Another key improvement action identified was to further develop and implement BC strategies: a BC strategy dimension to be added to the BCM approach where the critical activities, recovery times/levels, and minimum resource requirements identified during the BIA are considered against feasible worst-case scenarios to ascertain whether there are any gaps. Business continuity strategies (contingencies, risk mitigation, improved IT disaster recovery, investment in recovery capability, risk transfer via insurance, risk acceptance, etc.) should then be developed and implemented to address these gaps.

At the completion of the project, Teed’s consultant provided management with a clear understanding of their risk position and actions to improve/address the situation.

The client achieved its objective of an extensive and comprehensive BC review to provide them with an independent view of what needs to be done to maximise the efficacy of the proposed BC tool, plus improve current preparedness.

It is worth noting that this entire project was conducted through video conferencing which enabled the involvement of individuals across different geographical locations, including Teed’s consultant, making the best use of everyone’s time and keeping costs to a minimum.