Business continuity planning (BCP) is an integral part of any business. It can be defined as a process that includes making a prevention and recovery system that protects a company from any potential threat. The business continuity plan is usually created beforehand and makes sure that the assets and staff members are protected and can quickly operate in case of a disaster.
Disturbances and threats can lead to revenue loss and higher costs, which also means a decrease in profitability. This is why business continuity planning plays an important role in an organization’s risk management strategy since it also involves determining all risks and dangers that can affect its operations and performance.
Besides defining and identifying potential threats, the plan should also involve establishing how these risks will affect the company’s operations, applying protection measures and strategies to alleviate potential threats, testing these strategies to verify that they work, continuously review the process to ensure that everything is up to date.
Business continuity planning is crucial for many businesses and mining companies are not different. More so, the need for effective business continuity planning is more plausible when it comes to the mining industry because of the innate challenges and risks that come with it.
source:mining.com
According to Xyber Solutions, mining companies generally handle emergency management well but are lacking when it comes to proper follow-through and efficiency procedures connected to business recovery. Operational failures are not uncommon when it comes to the mining industry, and they are dealt with quickly and effectively, but companies struggle with the long-term impact on business recovery and the continuation of operations.
In the last few years, certain mining trends, for example, bigger reliance between downstream processes and operations, tighter supply chains, depletion of capacity redundancy, and the recovery of the prices of goods, have increased the business impact of a loss event.
Since trends in mining tend to change constantly, and an effective BCP should keep up with the changes and adapt to them accordingly. This way it enables an efficient and quick business recovery in case of a loss event, at the same time keeping the business impact to a minimum. Reputation risk caused by a badly managed loss event should not be underestimated. BCP is essential for offering a higher level of assurance requested by stakeholders and investors.
source:provident.bank
A notable loss event might set up the way risk consequences and possible future events are viewed by insurance companies. When arranging coverage, an effective business continuity plan offers greater leverage on the account of the insured.
The transfer of knowledge might not be an obvious benefit of a BCP, but it is nonetheless important. It is extremely challenging to transfer knowledge within mining teams since they are unstable and continuously change and there has been a loss of experienced mining staff in recent years. A business continuity plan can show and implant knowledge on recovery measures and provide skills to deal with plausible loss scenarios, at the same time ensuring that the obtained knowledge sticks.
There are numerous reasons why business continuity planning is important for the mining industry and creating an effective BCP should be a top priority for all companies.
