Automation of your BCMS Readiness and Continuous Improvement

We provide advisory services to help you manage and ensure your BCMS readiness at all times. For this to happen, we could help you to select, install, maintain and upgrade specialised BCM software to automate your Business Continuity Management System.

For organisations committed to implement a high quality BCMS, who have already put in considerable effort and expense to implement BCM within the organisation, it would be appropriate to also consider BCM automation as a means to maintain and enhance their Business Continuity Management System. A good time to automate your business continuity management system would be when you have implemented the relevant components of your BCMS and are looking to drive continuous improvement with peace of mind and reliability .

Easy to access and use, BCM Automation tools typically help drive efficiencies and cost savings across the entire
BCM process, including maintenance and continuous improvement, and also help ensure escalation and speedy closure of open issues. BCM automation software typically covers key BCM stages such as consolidation and creation of robust documentation related to:

• Business Impact Analysis – helps to identify and quantify vulnerabilities across timesensitive activities and dependencies, and also to dimension impacts and recovery requirements over time
• Threat and Risk Assessment – helps automate the Threat and Risk assessment, including identification of risk mitigation actions
• Business Continuity Planning – helps to develop and maintain effective, consistent and up-to-date incident management and business continuity plans that are available on demand. This takes into account the inputs from the BIA (such as the identified time-sensitive critical processes and RTO etc.). Most tools now offer plans and documentation that is available and accessible not just via hard copy but also via modern technologies such as via web browsers, on a tablet, handheld device, smartphone, whatsapp, via cloud etc. Most of such tools would also be flexible, scalable and multilingual.

Once implemented effectively, an ideal BCMS automation tool should reduce your need for ongoing resources to manage the BCMS readiness. So a good BCMS tool would typically involve minimal additional set-up costs and efforts, and place little or no additional strain on your resources. Additional benefits of using such automated tools are:

• Rapid Change Management – often, it is a major challenge to manage information manually, particularly in an environment that changes fast. Unless there is a robust change management plan in place, business changes often do not get reflected quickly in business continuity plans, thereby making the plan out-of-date and unreliable. Automation tools typically facilitate robust change management across multiple BCMS documents, thereby saving time and effort and also ensuring consistency of updates.
• Ownership – with the help of automated triggers and updates sent to the business owners/ user departments, usage of automated BCM tools can facilitate the departments to take ownership over their BCMS maintenance and improvement activities, rather than expecting all maintenance and improvement triggers to be the responsibility of or be initiated by the BCM Team/ BCM Manager/ Sponsor.
• Managing large volumes of data – many organizations are unable to manage and update several plans simultaneously, particularly across multiple offices located in multiple geographies. For them, making the decision to automate could be critical to promptly manage all BCMS changes.
• Reporting – Your Management and other stakeholders get the information they need, when they need it.
• Monthly affordable payments rather than up-front capital expenditure – Pay as you need, don’t pay for what you don’t need. Most such software can now be signed up on a pay-as-you-use basis, and so cost can be scaled up and down as required.
• Modular sign-ups – Avail of Software as a Service (SAAS), activate more modules as you need.
• Free upgrades – as and when new versions are released.
• Security – Encryption of data in motion and data at rest.
• Multi-platform availability and also integrated with social media etc – Supported typically via iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows mobile devices, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers.
• User-friendly – easy to use, backed up by videos, demonstrations etc., simple to use by various categories of users, even those who are not technologically astute.
• High Availability and 24×7 Support.

In case you need advice on BCM Automation and Notification Tools, call us today or write to us at
info@coreconsulting.ae .