Well prepared for business interruptions

Natural disasters, hacker attacks or failures in the supply chain – lots of things can cause interruptions to regular business operations and impact every company. This is especially true as competition becomes increasingly globally connected.

In today’s volatile and often incalculable environment, companies are like a living organism: they can adapt to market challenges and protect their value-adding chain through individual resilience. To do this, they need a strong immune system themselves, one that builds up their defences against external dangers and risks. Typical examples include building up reserve capacities in production, inventory or cooperation that extends beyond the supply chain, based on the level of risk they face.

Business continuity management (BCM) is an effective process that can be used to strengthen a company’s immune system. BCM is based on proactive planning, so that companies are prepared when a crisis occurs, and the value-adding process remains assured as far as possible even in the worst-case scenario. What is important here is not just to examine your own processes for risks, but also to look at risks in the supply chain. This is where supply chain risk management comes into play. The risk reduction effects achieved and the preparation for crisis events should also be taken into account when optimising insurance cover. Reducing the potential loss of earnings through redundantly designed (manufacturing) processes and diversification in the supply chains can lower the need for insurance and thus generate premium savings. Similarly, the existence of business continuity plans is already becoming a standard requirement in some industries in order to obtain insurance cover at all. Here, too, BCM thus has a positive influence on the insurability of companies.