Lessons from the Storm: Tips on Preparing, Recovering in Disaster

Business leaders in the southern United States have put their disaster preparedness plans to the test in recent weeks. What they learned from their ordeals likely will be added to a body of information on how best to prepare and respond in such situations.

Neil Kaufman, a business continuity consultant from PWC, offered these thoughts to business leaders based on his experience in the days following Superstorm Sandy.

Know your suppliers. If key suppliers do not have continuity plans, they may not be resilient enough to be part of your recovery. Integrate suppliers into a recovery strategy. Supplier management pre- and post-event became a point of widespread discussion.

Plan the work, and work the plan. Too often, an entire organization is not included in disaster preparedness/business continuity training. Success is limited when only the people who make the plan know the plan. In some cases, recovery priorities were neither broadly known nor up-to-date. Training—and practicing—across an organization is critical.

Silence is not golden. The ability to communicate in multiple ways—land lines, cell phones, satellite phones, social media—was essential to staying connected. Having multiple suppliers for service was critical to avoiding a busy signal or a dropped network. Many businesses wrongly calculated that staff would be able to access their work applications with remote computer connectivity for email and workflow.

All hands cannot be on deck. Most people were not available to focus on business recovery because they were dealt personal losses. Organizations had to function without key personnel. In many cases, those key people were not even accessible. Better prepared companies had developed a robust list of substitutes.

You are on your own. Don’t expect assistance from agencies and local authorities. Outside assistance wasn’t able to address many companies’ recovery needs. Those that fared better had prepared to lose their life-support systems (e.g. having generators that were tested and not located on ground floors, for example, and scheduling diesel fuel deliveries for those generators).

Read the fine print. Insurance did not cover all the losses from business interruption and property damage. Service agreements from vendors which read ‘best efforts’ were often a wake-up call. What’s more, the fine print often referenced ‘force majeure’ exceptions to the vendor taking responsibility for these “acts of God.” Reviewing coverage and policy limitations is part of staying prepared.  Source: PWC