Can You Swing Your Supply Chain into Action When Disaster Strikes?

Maintain detailed policies, processes and procedures and plan, plan, plan.

Supply chain disruptions can have a significant impact on your business, whether it’s lower productivity, delays in getting products to store shelves or unhappy customers. Imagine a tornado rips the roof off your main distribution center, a fire turns your production facility into a crater or a flood grounds your fleet. Without a plan, any of these events can grind your supply chain – and your business – to a halt.

Being properly prepared and able to launch a response that prevents or mitigates the impact of the disruption means maintaining and documenting your supply chain processes and procedures. It also means having plans in place. Then if/when disaster strikes, you can swing your backup plan into action and bring additional people up to speed quickly. Consider these five steps to planning for disaster:

1. Map and assess internal & external risks: collect data about your supply chain, understand the interdependencies between nodes (e.g. a key supplier’s dependency on a particular transportation company) and identify threats that could disrupt/disable your supply chain. Develop and document strategies, plans and procedures to maintain the continuity of your supply chain.
2. Create a contingency plan: develop process-level plans that map solutions to the risks and strategies you identify. Encourage internal supply chain teams and external vendors, technology providers and supply chain partners to help develop the plan. Then test, test and test again.
3. Get suppliers and vendors on the same page: In a perfect world, you’d have a backup plan for every supply chain stakeholder. At the very least, focus on the vendors and partners most essential to the day-to-day operations of your supply chain. Ask for and review their business continuity/disaster recovery plans, share yours with them and work to get them all in sync.
4. Draw up plans for specific scenarios: your responses to different types of disasters may vary. For example, you may react one way to a hurricane and respond completely differently to a power or telecom outage, health pandemic or transportation system disruption.
5. Have an evacuation plan: outline detailed plans for evacuation and shelter-in-place plans and practice regularly. Know where to go if you’re asked to evacuate. Make note of alternate routes if major roads are clogged or close. Establish backup locations for your key facilities and a central meeting place for employees.

To learn more about the importance of readying your supply chain, read our previous post, “Is Your Supply Chain Ready for a Disaster?”

Stay tuned for the next post in our Disaster Preparedness series on how to prepare if you actually need to place assets in or around affected areas.

 Written by Glenn Stept, Group Manager, Ryder Dedicated

 Mr. Stept is a Group Manager with Ryder Dedicated. Mr. Stept has over 25 years of experience in the supply chain and logistics industry. Throughout his time at Ryder, Mr. Stept has implemented, operated, and supported numerous supply chain operations for customers across a variety of industry segments.