Every business owner needs to be aware of operational resilience, what it is, why it’s important and how to ensure it. This article will take a closer look at operational stability to provide a deeper understanding of its importance in the business world and why you should implement an operational resilience strategy.

What Is Operational Resilience?

Essentially, operational resilience guarantees that your business can continue to function during times of disaster. In essence, it has the ability to adapt, resist, absorb and recover from problems and issues in such a way that your customers and the community are not hindered during the time the issue is being resolved. It’s all about business continuity.

Why Is Operational Resilience So Important?

Failing to have a strategy or steps in place to counteract business problems, regardless of what they might be, will result in your business effectively grinding to a halt if something does go wrong. This can result in the loss of customers as well as business income and, perhaps even worse, damage to the reputation of your business and brand.

Strategies for operational resilience should become a part of a business risk management plan, as a risk management plan incorporates recognising potential risks and implementing procedures and changes to either prevent those risks from occurring or having contingency plans and operations in place if a risk does become a reality.

What are some steps business owners can take to help guarantee operational resilience?

Implement Operational Resilience Software

Some software designers create software specifically to manage business risk and operational resilience. The software will help you understand important business services, prioritise vulnerabilities, enable you to capture data and report in a time-effective manner, as well as to address any regulatory requirements.

In essence, this type of sophisticated and dedicated software will enable business owners to prepare, withstand, recover and adapt if and when a problem does surface, ensuring business continuity as the issue gets resolved.

If you want to get serious about operational resilience, then installing software that assists with this is a must.

Create An Operational Resilience Strategy

This really goes hand in hand with implementing risk management strategies. Not only will your risk management strategy attempt to head off potential risks and problems, but it also incorporates steps to implement in the event that an issue does occur, despite making all efforts to avoid risk.

Part of the process of creating an operational resilience strategy is to break your business processes down into sections to focus on. This then makes it easier to come up with contingency plans. For example, you could break things down into the following sections, depending on the nature of your business and the industry you are in.

  • Business processes
  • IT systems
  • Communications
  • Customers
  • Supply chains
  • And so on…

Effective operational resilience is not developed overnight but rather something that is developed over time and is an ongoing process. It starts with an operational framework and is then expanded upon to create an operational resilience plan.

What’s most essential is to identify critical business processes and services; those services that are essential for business continuity should a disaster occur. Steps can only be taken to ensure operational resilience in key areas once those areas have been defined. Operational resilience software, as mentioned earlier in the piece, can assist enormously with this step.

In addition, impact tolerances need to be assessed. In other words, defining the maximum level of disruption that can be tolerated in the event of a problem. How much risk is there to the firm or the customer should a particular aspect of the business be affected by an issue?

With these details assessed and logged, an operational resilience strategy can then be mapped out and prioritised according to the degree of impact problems would have on critical business processes.

If a problem does occur, it’s also vital to learn from that and implement strategies that will prevent the same issue from recurring in the future.

In Conclusion

Every business owner needs to be aware of operational resilience and put measures in place to mitigate the impact of problems and disasters. It’s essential for business continuity and to ensure your business remains profitable for the long term.

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