Index
- Identify potential disruptions to your business
- Risk assessment and prioritization of business functions
- Development of a communication plan for employees and stakeholders
- Establish emergency preparedness procedures
- Implement data backup and recovery
- BCP employee training
- Test and refine your design
- Ensure your BCP is continually maintained and reviewed
- conclusion
Are you an SME owner in Singapore and want to ensure business continuity in the face of unexpected outages? Creating an effective business continuity plan (BCP) can help you do just that.
The BCP is a comprehensive document that outlines the procedures and protocols your company will follow in the event of a crisis or disaster. By developing a BCP, you can identify potential risks and disruptions, prioritize your business activities, and establish contingency procedures to minimize downtime and ensure business continuity.
In this article, we will guide you through the process of setting up BCP for Singapore SME. We cover the key steps involved in developing a comprehensive plan, including identifying potential outages, assessing risks, prioritizing business operations, developing communication plans, establishing emergency response procedures, implementing backup and recovery measures, employee training, testing and improvement of your design. and ensure that your BCP is continually maintained and reviewed.
By following these steps, you can create a BCP that helps you stay on top of your company's operations even when you face unexpected challenges.
Identify potential disruptions to your business
Don't let unexpected events catch you off guard - take the time to identify potential disruptions to keep Singapore SME businesses running smoothly. Risk mitigation and contingency planning are critical steps in creating an effective business continuity plan.
Identify potential disruptions that could impact your business, such as natural disasters, cyber-attacks, supply chain disruptions and employee absenteeism. Make a list of potential risks and analyze their likelihood and impact on your operations. This step allows you to prioritize your response and allocate resources accordingly.
It is also important to involve key stakeholders in the risk assessment process, including employees, suppliers and customers. By identifying potential disruptions, you can create a comprehensive plan to help minimize the impact of unexpected events and ensure your business continues to thrive.
Risk assessment and prioritization of business functions
Assessing potential risks and prioritizing your company's core activities is the first step to ensure its survival in times of crisis. Risk assessment is essential to determine the likelihood and impact of potential disruptions to your business.
Once you've identified the risks, rank your business functions in order of importance. This will help you prioritize the functions that need to be restored first in case of a crisis. It is important to involve key stakeholders in this process to ensure that all perspectives are considered.
By assessing risks and prioritizing business operations, you can develop a business continuity plan that enables your Singapore SME to effectively respond to any disruption and minimize the impact on your operations. Remember to review and update your plan regularly to ensure it remains relevant and up to date.
Development of a communication plan for employees and stakeholders
Developing a communications plan for employees and stakeholders is critical to ensuring everyone is informed and prepared, increasing the likelihood of a successful response to a crisis.
As an SME in Singapore, it's important to consider internal messages between employees to ensure everyone is on the same page. This can be achieved by appointing a communications officer who will be responsible for communicating information and updates to all employees.
In addition, external disclosure is also important to inform stakeholders and customers about the status and any changes in business activities. This can be done through social media platforms or email newsletters that provide regular status updates.
Finally, it's important to create a crisis communication protocol that outlines the steps to take during a crisis, including who to contact and what information to provide. With a well-crafted and executed communications plan, your SME can handle a crisis effectively and minimize its business impact.
Establish emergency preparedness procedures
Now is the time to establish emergency response procedures to ensure your staff's safety and minimize the impact of a crisis. As a Singapore SME owner, it is important to have a comprehensive plan that outlines the steps to take in an emergency. This plan should include identifying potential hazards, establishing emergency evacuation procedures, and conducting regular emergency drills to ensure your staff are prepared. In addition, you must have a crisis management team that can respond quickly and effectively to any situation that arises. By following these steps, you can minimize the impact of a crisis and ensure the safety of your team and stakeholders. To help you get started, use the table below to outline your emergency response procedures.
| emergency procedures | Description | responsible party |
|---|---|---|
| Identification of potential hazards | Perform risk assessment to identify possible emergency situations | Security |
| Establish emergency evacuation procedures | Prepare a plan for the safe evacuation of your premises in case of an emergency | facility manager |
| do emergency exercises | Schedule regular emergency drills to ensure your team is prepared for any situation | Personnel manager |
| Creation of a crisis management team | Develop a team responsible for emergency preparedness and crisis management | Manager |
| Communicate emergency procedures | Make sure all employees and stakeholders are aware of emergency procedures | Head of Communications |
Remember, having emergency response procedures in place is critical to the safety of your staff and the success of your business. By taking the time to develop a comprehensive plan and conducting regular emergency drills, you can ensure your team is prepared for any situation that may arise.
Implement data backup and recovery
Make sure all your important data is safe by implementing data backup and recovery. This lets you relax knowing that even in the midst of a crisis, your vital business information is protected.
Consider using cloud storage solutions to store your data offsite. This allows easy access to your information even if your physical location has been compromised.
Additionally, disaster recovery services can help you quickly restore your data in the event of a disaster. This ensures that your business can continue to operate normally.
By taking the time to implement these measures, you can protect your business data and minimize the impact of any unforeseen events.
BCP employee training
You can ensure your company's preparedness for any emergency by training your employees on how to perform BCP. Employee engagement is critical to implementing a successful BCP, and it all starts with effective training.
Your employees must understand their roles and responsibilities in an emergency, as well as the procedures and protocols to be followed. Conduct regular drills and simulations to test your readiness and identify areas for improvement.
Training effectiveness can be measured through feedback and evaluation, which should be used to improve the BCP and increase employee readiness. By investing in employee training, you not only increase your company's chances of surviving a crisis, but also instill a culture of resilience and preparedness in your workforce.
Test and refine your design
Testing and refining the BCP is critical to ensuring its success in a crisis, as it allows you to identify weaknesses and make necessary improvements.
One way to test your plan is through virtual exercises, which simulate a crisis situation and allow you to see how people and processes perform under pressure. This can help you identify areas for improvement and make necessary changes to your plan.
Additionally, seeking feedback from employees and stakeholders can provide you with valuable information about the effectiveness of your plan and allow you to make changes based on their experiences and suggestions.
It is important to remember that creating a BCP is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process of improving and adapting to changing conditions. By regularly testing and refining your plan, you can ensure that Singapore SMEs are prepared for any crisis that may arise.
Ensure your BCP is continually maintained and reviewed
Don't let your BCP become outdated or irrelevant - stay current with ongoing maintenance and review to ensure your business's resilience to unexpected challenges.
Regular evaluation is key to ensuring your plan remains effective and relevant. Schedule periodic reviews and updates to ensure your plan is current and reflects any changes in your organization or external factors that may affect your operations.
Updating and improving is also essential to maintaining the effectiveness of your BCP. As you identify areas for improvement, make the necessary changes to ensure your design is as complete and robust as possible.
Also, ensure compliance with legal requirements by staying current with any changes to regulations or directives that may affect your BCP.
By keeping up with ongoing maintenance and auditing, you can ensure your business is well prepared to face any unexpected challenges.
conclusion
Congratulations on completing your Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for Singapore SMEs! By following the steps outlined in this article, you've taken a proactive approach to mitigating potential disruptions to your business operations.
You've identified potential risks, assessed the criticality of your business operations, developed communication and emergency plans, implemented backup measures, trained your employees, and tested and improved your plan.
By ensuring your BCP is regularly maintained and audited, you are ready to deal with unexpected events and can minimize the impact on your business.
Remember that a well-planned and executed BCP can not only protect your company from financial loss, but also improve your reputation and build trust among your shareholders.
Good luck in your professional endeavors!
FAQs
What is Singapore standard for business continuity management? ›
Understand and prioritize the threats to your business with the international standard for business continuity. ISO 22301 specifies the requirements for a management system to protect against, reduce the likelihood of, and ensure your business recovers from disruptive incidents.
What are the 5 components of a business continuity plan? ›- Risks and potential business impact. ...
- Planning an effective response. ...
- Roles and responsibilities. ...
- Communication. ...
- Testing and training. ...
- Building your own business continuity plan.
- Determine your greatest risk potential. ...
- Establish your Power Needs. ...
- Create a communications plan. ...
- Prepare your supply chain. ...
- Make sure you have enough insurance to recover. ...
- Protect your critical data in the Cloud. ...
- Test the plan.
OVERVIEW. This code provides general guidance in the design, construction, installation, testing and commissioning, operation and maintenance of air-conditioning and mechanical ventilation systems in all commercial, office, and institutional buildings except health care facilities.
How much does business continuity earn in Singapore? ›The national average salary for a Business Continuity Manager is $180,000 in Singapore.
What are the 3 R's of business continuity strategy? ›These set of procedures, or the 3rs of a business continuity strategy are: Respond, Restart, Reimagine.
What are the 4 pillars of business continuity? ›The four pillars of a BCP are assessment, preparedness, response, and recovery. Assessment includes hazard identification and risk evaluation.
What are the 4 Ps of business continuity? ›When devising a business continuity strategy, you should consider the 4 P's, which are: people (staff and customers), processes (the technology and processes required), premises and providers, suppliers and partners.
What is an example of a business continuity plan? ›A key component of a business continuity plan (BCP) is a disaster recovery plan that contains strategies for handling IT disruptions to networks, servers, personal computers and mobile devices. The plan should cover how to reestablish office productivity and enterprise software so that key business needs can be met.
What should a good business continuity plan include? ›- An analysis of all critical functions within your business. ...
- A prioritized list of risks that pose a severe or even catastrophic threat to your business. ...
- A list of specific strategies (or mitigation activities) that help protect the critical components you identified earlier in the BCP.
What are the six phases of business continuity planning? ›
Basically, the business continuity management lifecycle has six phases to it: program management, understanding the organization, determining the BCM strategy, developing and implementing a BCM response, exercising the response, as well as maintaining, reviewing and embedding BCM in the organization's culture.
Who should write the business continuity plan? ›Resource Required to Support Recovery Strategies
Recovery of a critical or time-sensitive process requires resources. The Business Continuity Resource Requirements worksheet should be completed by business function and process managers.
A business continuity plan has three key elements: Resilience, recovery and contingency. An organization can increase resilience by designing critical functions and infrastructures with various disaster possibilities in mind; this can include staffing rotations, data redundancy and maintaining a surplus of capacity.
What is Singapore Standard CP 19? ›OVERVIEW. Provides visual conditions necessary to alleviate panic and permit safe evacuation of the building occupants in the event of failure of the normal lighting, and at the same time prescribes requirements for the equipment and installation methods used to provide the power supply for the emergency lighting.
What is Singapore Standard 586 2014? ›This Singapore Standard adopts the United Nations' Recommendations on the Transport of Dangerous Goods, which provides an international system for the classification of dangerous goods by the types of hazards that they present. It also specifies standard hazard communication DG labels.
What is Singapore Standards 532? ›SS 532 : 2016
The users of this standard is responsible to carry out their respective risk assessment in order to identify any possible gaps or enhancement works for improvement. Additional fire safety provisions and mitigation measures may be required to put in place, and be integrated as one system.
CMO Salaries in Singapore
The national average salary for a CMO is $312,500 in Singapore.
Senior Manager salaries at Bain & Company can range from $225,000 - $260,000 per year.
How much does continuous improvement pay in Singapore? ›The national average salary for a Continuous Improvement Specialist is $4,650 in Singapore.
What are the three stages of business continuity planning? ›In this blog we will look at how CM relates to Business Continuity Management (BCM), what actually defines a crisis, and the three stages that are experienced from an incident of this kind – crisis of management, operational, and crisis of legitimation.
What is the RTO in business continuity? ›
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in continuity.
Is business continuity part of ERM? ›Business continuity management is an important part of ERM and will continue to be so: it covers, or partly covers, several of COSO's risk categories.
How many key phases are in a business continuity plan? ›Business continuity plans go through five basic phases, from initiation to maintenance and updating.
What is the difference between business resilience and business continuity? ›It's easiest to think of business continuity as the set of procedures that allow an organization to continue operating during a crisis. In contrast, resilience is the capability to withstand the shock of an unexpected disruption and rebound to an acceptable state of ongoing operation.
What are the 4 C's vs the 4 Ps? ›The 4Ps of product, price, place, and promotion refer to the products your company is offering and how to get them into the hands of the consumer. The 4Cs refer to stakeholders, costs, communication, and distribution channels which are all different aspects of how your company functions.
What are the barriers to effective BCM? ›- Lack of Resources. ...
- Lack of Executive Support. ...
- Lack of Organizational Engagement. ...
- Insufficient Tools and Technology. ...
- Lack of Routine Testing. ...
- Inability to Monitor the Program. ...
- High Complexity. ...
- Constant Training.
- Develop the contingency planning policy statement. ...
- Conduct the business impact analysis (BIA). ...
- Identify preventive controls. ...
- Create contingency strategies. ...
- Develop an information system contingency plan. ...
- Ensure plan testing, training, and exercises. ...
- Ensure plan maintenance.
- The function is defined at x = a; that is, f(a) equals a real number.
- The limit of the function as x approaches a exists.
- The limit of the function as x approaches a is equal to the function value at x = a.
When Hurricane Harvey hit their area, the company's office was damaged beyond repair. Fortunately, the company relied on secure data storage in the cloud to allow staff members to work remotely as soon as the storm hit. They were able to maintain operations and never lost any of their most important documents.
What is the most important goal of business continuity plan? ›The main goal of business continuity planning is to support key company activities during a crisis. Planning ensures a company can run with limited resources or restricted access to buildings. Continuity planning also aims to minimize revenue or reputation losses.
How long does IT take to write a business continuity plan? ›
While it can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months to complete a comprehensive business continuity plan, the long-term benefits of creating a plan can't be stated enough.
What is Singapore standard regulation? ›Singapore Standards are nationally recognized documents, established by consensus. They are functional or technical requirements in the form of specifications for materials, product system or process, codes of practice, methods of test, terminologies and guides.
What is the ISO business continuity management systems standards practiced in Capgemini? ›Capgemini Business Services has an Integrated Management System (IMS) that is certified globally against ISO 27001, ISO 9001 and ISO 22301.
Which international standards are we certified against for BCMS? ›ISO 22301 is the international standard for Business Continuity Management (BCM).
How many Singapore standards are there? ›Singapore Standards on Auditing (SSAs)
The SSA has 7 main series starting from the 200 series to the 800 series.
The BCA Green Mark 2021 (GM: 2021) is an internationally recognised green building certification scheme tailored for the tropical climate. It encourages the industry and professionals to collaborate and develop green building solutions, raising Singapore's built environment's sustainability standards.
What is the state ISO for Singapore? ›ISO 3166-2:SG is the entry for Singapore in ISO 3166-2, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which defines codes for the names of the principal subdivisions (e.g., provinces or states) of all countries coded in ISO 3166-1.
What is Singapore Strategic Goods act? ›The Strategic Goods (Control) Act 2002 is an Act to control the transfer and brokering of strategic goods, strategic goods technology, goods and technology capable of being used to develop, produce, operate, stockpile or acquire weapons capable of causing mass destruction, and missiles capable of delivering such ...
Does ISO 9001 require a business continuity plan? ›Answer: ISO 9001:2015 doesn´t require a Business Continuity Plan to the organizations. That being said, a BCP can help organizations to recognize, mitigate and address risks to your business. Also some customers may require a BCP to their suppliers so it will depend on the company to satisfy this expectation/need.
What is the international standard for business continuity management? ›ISO 22301, is the recognised international standard for Business Continuity Management Systems (BCMS), published by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO).
What is the latest ISO standard for business continuity? ›
ISO 22301:2019, Security and resilience – Business continuity management systems – Requirements, is a management system standard published by International Organization for Standardization that specifies requirements to plan, establish, implement, operate, monitor, review, maintain and continually improve a documented ...
How often should a business continuity plan be tested? ›The size, location, and how often your company goes through changes are typically the most significant factors in determining how often you should test your BCP. Enterprise companies and employees who experience regular turnover should be updating and testing their BCPs twice a year.
What is the top priority of BCM objectives? ›A key objective of a BCM system is to ensure business continuity in the face of any type of disruption. This means that companies must be prepared for any potential disruption to continue operations with minimal disruption.
What is the difference between ISO 22301 and ISO 27001? ›ISO 22301 and ISO 27001 are one such pair. While ISO 27001 requires an information security management system, ISO 22301 requires a business continuity management system.
Is Singapore a member of ISO? ›The SSC represents Singapore in key international organisations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
Are Singapore standards mandatory? ›National and international standards adoption is indeed voluntary, except when it is made mandatory by a regulatory authority.
What is the difference between IFRS and SFRS? ›The SFRS for Small Entities is based on the IFRS for SMEs. The main differences are the references to Singapore Financial Reporting Standards (SFRS) instead of IFRS, as well as the description of the scope and applicability of the SFRS for Small Entities.