There are fears that the winter could see a resurgence in swine flu after the initial outbreak this summer. There are warnings that up to 50 per cent of staff could get swine flu and, as a result, be off work for up to four weeks. Businesses therefore need to be prepared to manage this very high level of potential staff absence.
The threat of swine flu should be a wake-up call to all businesses to make sure they have a robust business continuity plan (BCP) in place to mitigate against the risk of operational downtime that could be caused - not just by swine flu but also by a variety of scenarios such as power cuts or floods.
A typical BCP for service centres should plan for a variety of catastrophic circumstances. We approach the issue of continuity planning on three levels:
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Centre-level BCP – which covers the various scenarios that could impact one particular site
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Multi-geography approach – in many cases it is appropriate to divide operations for delivery from different cities or geographies
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Client-specific approach – which develops a plan specific to the clients particular requirements and business model
We categorise a flu pandemic as a potential denial of site situation, meaning that a particular site may need to be closed. Solutions to mitigate this, beyond the multi-geography approach, may include a provision for home working.
In any good BCP, the IT infrastructure must also be highly robust to enable the rapid switching of customer calls and back-office processing work to an alternative facility in the event of a crisis. Firstsources Enterprise Nerve Centre, based in Mumbai, India, enables us to remotely manage, monitor and control our technology infrastructure across the world, so that IT traffic can be intelligently routed and resources deployed where they are needed.
Businesses that have an outsourcing strategy will be in a good position to continue business as usual during a pandemic by virtue of the fact that it provides the opportunity for creating wide physical diversity of critical office based operations. We recommend that clients spread their operations across multiple cities and countries.
Equally, those organisations with established outsourced relationships have access to an inherent flexibility that allows a cost effective increase in resource in anticipation of large scale staff absenteeism.
Matthew Vallance is President of Firstsource Solutions, a global business process outsourcing company
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