IAMC Rocks! - WE will be the disruptors.

Raymond Ocasio of Gulfstream moderated the Manufacturing Industry Group meeting at the Québec City Professional Forum.

Overview

For manufacturers, particularly of expensive capital equipment, a business continuity plan is a must. It is the result of intensive brainstorming and consensus forging among senior leaders.

Key Takeaways

Business continuity planning helps organizations recover faster from disasters.

Business continuity plans help companies restore mission-critical functions after disasters that make normal business impossible. Some of the key objectives of business continuity planning include:

• Safeguarding human life.

• Minimizing confusion during an emergency (e.g., over who is responsible for doing what).

• Prioritizing facilities, functions, and processes; determining what resources each would need to return to normal operations.

• Minimizing the loss of vital data and records.

The process involves senior leaders forging consensus on what is most critical to the business.

Business continuity plans start with clear understanding of what is most critical to the business, i.e. which functions, facilities, and resources most need to be safeguarded and which processes need to be restored first. These decisions must be made by senior leaders; the heads of each functional area need to take the time, often involving laborious work, to forge consensus on these tough but critical decisions.

After the prioritizing is done comes brainstorming about different kinds of disasters, their possible effects on operations, and the actions to take under those hypothetical scenarios. From those discussions, a plan is gradually built and continually revisited and refined.

Other best practices include figuring out what procedures to implement under disaster scenarios.

• Make sure decisions are data-based. Getting the right information to make the critical prioritization decisions is hugely important.

• Figure out what new processes, procedures, and policies you may need under various disaster scenarios. For example, how would you safely shut down the systems of a building you had to evacuate? How long would you pay employees who were unable to return to work? How about if you couldn’t reach them physically via roads?

• Set up an emergency command center. Or establish several, powered by generators and outfitted with comprehensive IT systems.

Suggested Action: Set up emergency command centers.

• Have one point person in charge of execution of the business continuity plan.

• Create “disaster packs” for key personnel. Senior leaders and those responsible for executing business recovery plans should have stored for them “disaster packs” of emergency provisions including satellite phones (in case conventional telecommunications systems are down): one pack at their homes, one at each of the firm’s command centers, and one at a hotel.

• Build redundancies into manufacturing processes and supply chains. In the event that some of your usual facilities or suppliers are rendered inoperative, you want to have ways to resume operations without these particular resources.

Suggested Action: Build redundancies into manufacturing processes and supply chains.

• Create plans for all locations company-wide. Tailor business continuity plans to the most likely disasters for locations, considering geopolitical risks, climate, the potential for social unrest, etc.

• Involve vendors and suppliers in business continuity planning. Make them aware of how your plan may affect them, and learn what they would do to meet the demands of your business in the event of a disaster.

• Maintain good partnerships with local electric power, transportation, police, and civic authorities. Involve them in your business contingency planning.

Suggested Action: Test business continuity plans via disaster scenario simulations.

• Use drills to train employees on what to do and expect under emergency conditions. Incorporate learnings from these exercises into plan improvements.

• Continually develop and improve plans. There are so many potential disasters that could affect operations in various ways that no business continuity plan is ever complete. Keep working to flesh it out further to address more scenarios and become even more prepared.

The corporate real estate (CRE) discipline was initially slow to adopt powerful software solutions, perhaps because real estate is to a large extent a people-to-people business. But with growing pressure to cut budgets and streamline headcounts, CRE departments were compelled to adopt new communications and real estate portfolio management technologies.

There is, however, a downside to technology overload. Managers must take care that new software, apps and electronic devices solve more problems than they create, and they must preserve the vital role of human conversation in the work process.

Back to the Future: Can We TALK?

Ineffective use of technology can affect social behavior, perhaps even reshape personalities. For example, a virtual lifestyle can cause impatience, impulsiveness and forgetfulness. Sometimes called digital distraction, this can diminish empathy by limiting how we engage with people, affecting connectivity, social ties and business results.

The world has seen incredible enthusiasm for the cell phone. A United Nations report says, “Of the world’s 7 billion people, 6 billion have mobile phones.”

When your phone almost never leaves your hand, you may suffer from digital device separation anxiety. To that end, we should be careful of always viewing the world through such a restricted lens. Instead, have more face-to-face conversations and living in the moment, which will both support development and maintenance of personal relationships.

Turn Off Technology and Tune Into Reality

The term digital dementia was coined by top German neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer in 2012. He describes how overuse of digital technology can result in the breakdown of cognitive abilities, much in a way commonly recognized in those who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness.

Excessive digital connecting deprives the brain of downtime. The Internet encourages rapid, distracted samplings of small bits of information from numerous sources. If our screen lives become more compelling than our real lives, we merely retain bits of random information with no common element, thus becoming disconnected participants in threads of virtual discussions.

Further along the lines of digital dementia, information acquired while partially distracted is often quickly forgotten, making learning shallow. Alternatively, try retrieving information organically. Reading a good, old-fashioned book with pages you turn has been shown to improve memory retention.

Single-Tasking Saves Time In the Long Run

The idea that humans can multi-task is a misnomer. When bouncing from distraction to distraction, we are actually switching tasks rather than accomplishing multiple tasks simultaneously. Although the ability to juggle tasks is a great strength, digital devices may not always improve our ability to multi-task.

Digital distraction contributes to our hectic lifestyle, preventing concentration and information retention. How can we capture the attention of increasingly fragmented and inattentive audiences? According to a November 2013 blog post on the Alzheimer’s website, a study in Seoul, Korea, stated more people are connected to digital devices there (over 67 percent) than anywhere else in the world. The study also found young people raised in this highly digital environment showed early signs of short-term memory dysfunction.

Is there a simple remedy for controlling digital distraction? Research has shown taking on one task at a time in priority order is the most effective way to work.

The pace of technology advancements has exceeded our expectations; digital experiences overwhelm the senses. But real-time person-to-person interaction requires a longer attention span during discussions. Have we crossed the digital divide to a place where we prefer using electronic communication tools at the expense of furthering important relationships?