Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning is about identifying the parts of your business that you can't afford to lose for example, staff; premises; information and stock and planning how to maintain these if an incident occurs.

Having these plans in place will:

• Minimise the impact and negative effect on your business
• Help your business to recover as quickly as possible

There are other benefits of creating your own business continuity plan which will help to:

• Develop a clearer understanding of how your organisation works
• Protect your business and ensure that it will not impact on your employees, share-holders, partners, contractors, stakeholders and especially your customers
• Protect the reputation of your business
• Produce clear cost benefits: by identifying and preparing for disruptions in advance this can reduce your financial expenditure and management time in the long term

Business Continuity Planning

Business continuity planning should be proportionate to the risks for your business as it is difficult to plan for every possible eventuality. It is recommended that you develop a generic business continuity plan, focusing on the impact of different types of disruptive events in your local area.

Further advice is available from the UK Government on how businesses can prepare for emergencies and the Scottish Government on how to keep trading during and following an emergency.

Experience has shown that businesses that have business continuity management arrangements in place are more likely to stay in business and recover quickly in the event of an emergency than those that do not.

Contact Details

Service Manager
Civil Protection and Corporate Risk
Dumfries and Galloway Council
43 Newall Terrace
Dumfries

Tel: 01387 260046