Prepare for Unexpected with a Business Continuity Plan

Maybe it’s a flood, tornado, or 24 inches of snow quickly followed by another foot. Possibly it’s a man-made calamity like a cyberattack. If you’re fortunate, it’s a good but challenging problem like increased sales. 

No matter the cause, businesses can suffer unexpected disruptions that have ruinous effects on operations and the bottom line. By crafting and testing a business continuity plan, your company can have a road map that partially or fully disaster-proofs the business from events ranging from sales dips and spikes to rebuilding the main office. It’s a resource that helps companies react to unforeseen events in a more comprehensive way instead of dealing with issues piecemeal. 

As part of detailed business continuity and disaster recovery plan, you can: 

• Construct processes and beef up technology that allow even more employees to work remotely than already do. 
• Further shift to digital solutions that reduce such menial, manual task as filling out expense reports, performing data entry, or sending payments to vendors, since that kind of automation allows work to be done from anywhere.  
• Stress-test your systems and tech vendors to ensure they will hold up under pressure and determine how to create and access backups as needed.  

Those are, of course, just some broad elements of a plan. Our new whitepaper and business continuity plan template, created through a partnership of SAP Concur and B2B payments expert TransferMate, takes a close look at ways to develop a plan, including action steps to consider and questions to ask. With the guide and a commitment to follow through, your company can be prepared for change and turn moments of uncertainty into moments of confidence. 

Start planning a plan 

A business continuity plan must cover a lot of ground and contingencies. Our template can help jump-start the discussion on a number of fronts. 

Assessing impacts. Ask what sites are critical or how many people are needed at each location or could go fully remote. 

Find technology gaps. Determine whether your IT team can quickly recover data and whether your tech vendors are able to keep your data secure and respond during a disaster. 

Scrutinize communications. Determine whether you will have the tools to stay in touch with your employees and reinforce your commitment to keeping them safe. And make certain that customers, too, can connect and be reassured. 

Prepare for the worst. Map out what-if and worst-case scenarios, from being unable to access data and buildings to securing them from damage.  

Because you can’t imagine every last thing that could go wrong, expect and plan for all the flexibility you can and ensure you have the resources in hand to pull it off. And make sure one of those resources is a leadership team that’s aware of and onboard for the continuity plan you’ve worked hard to create. 

Creating continuity 

Read our whitepaper, How to Create an Effective Business Continuity Plan, for insights on preparing your business to operate no matter what disruption it faces, as well as information on how SAP Concur expense, travel and invoice solutions can make it easy to conduct business on the go.