Business Plan

Chemical Products Inc.

Business Contingency Plan

Business Contingency Plans or BCP and very beneficial to the continued success of a company and are required by most companies. Even though a BCP incurs cost for establishing, preparing, and implementing the BCP the overall loss a company would endure financially if one was not in place would be substantially higher. A BCP should contain sections regarding pre-risk, securing company data, securing customer data, communication plan with company heads and stake holders, and post incident. In the sections below you will see the BCP for Chemical Products Inc.

Pre-Risk

What can Chemical Products Inc. do to help mitigate the risk and its effects before it even occurs? Implementing trainings, drills, and policy on handling risks when they occur is the basis to eliminate long term effects. Making sure every employee especially those employees that oversee the whole department know what to do and how to successfully do it is very important.

Training department heads on what steps to take as soon as the risk happens will ensure a smooth transition into mitigating the risk and decreasing the effects it will have on the overall profit loss of the company. These trainings need to incorporate different risks that can arise throughout the company. Regardless if the risk directly affects the department they must know what their role is when it happens.

Another pre-risk measure that can be taken is drills. Upper management should conduct drill and have mock emergencies happen regularly. This will allow the company to evaluate how quickly departments react to the risk and if they are doing what they are suppose.

Drills like this will allow the company to make changes where needed and coach employees on what was done right or wrong. Continuous improvement after evaluating the drills will make our risk response better and more efficient.

Policies should also be designed on how to respond to risk and what to do with confidential company and client information. These policies will be given to every employee and will be more detailed for upper management. This is due to their increase responsibility for not only their employees in the department but also their responsibility for the day to day operations of that department.

The drills, training, and policies may not be the same for every risk the business may encounter. That why when we design the BCP we must focus on the different risks and what trainings and drills must be molded and geared towards specific risks and not general ones. All of these are put in place to ensure the best possible response and timely mitigation.

The final pre-risk activity should ensure that any chemicals that cannot power due to their sensitivity to different conditions have generators to back them up. In our industry a lot of these materials have to maintain a certain temperature so that they do not become dangerous or even explode.

Sensitive Data

When it comes to the data of company during a risk how do we protect it? Not only that but how do we make sure it is being used ethically by our employees? These are things that management has taken into consideration when developing the BCP. First we must focus on how we will back up our data before the risk and during the risk. Using external servers that are in a secure location will aid in this. These servers must operate on a separate network to insure any type of cyber-attack on the network does not affect the backed up data. Also only essential management should know the location and have the security clearances to access this location and information. This will help defer the chance of an employee's gaining access to the information if our firewalls are breached.

After the data is backed up and secured when then have to focus on retrieving the data and recovering once operations are back up and running. This is a process that we have to be secure about. Transferring the data from the secure server and network back to the corporate one must be done.

VPN networks must be set up for essential employees to access any company data needed even after an emergency takes place. This will help decrease the amount of productivity loss during the emergency. VPN access will also allow management to monitor any chemicals that cannot reach a critical temperature. Also having hard copy backup for important and sensitive material will help aid in quick recovery.

Customer Data

We are now in the age of technology. Thanks to the advances of the internet business and consumers can conduct purchases and sales all over the world straight