The ability to make product during a disaster event is as critical to a manufacturing company as moving currency is to a bank. Unfortunately, Manufacturing Continuity is often much harder to address than “simple” disaster recovery or business continuity. There are often simply no quick and painless ways to eliminate dependency on a $50M custom made production line or to replace a single vendor of a critical component.
Nevertheless, manufacturing continuity planning is just as important to reducing risk as business continuity planning, even if the final solutions take longer to implement. The first step is to understand the critical processes/products produced at each site; major manufacturing infrastructure/equipment dependencies for each of those processes; uniqueness of each major infrastructure/equipment component; other manufacturing resources (specialized staff, specific location, unique logistics, etc.) critical to the process; existing resiliency (if any) an/or single points of failure for each infrastructure/equipment component; relative importance of the process/product relative to the portion of corporate income/value attributed to each.
By defining each process/product’s individual Recovery Time Objective, insight into the overall continuity requirement will emerge, which in turn will provide the framework for preliminary solutioning. We will work with your specialists to identify the following for each unique site/process/product combination: the effect of seasonal or other event-driven variations, the impacts associated with not making product (direct financial, legal or contractual, customer service, operational, reputation/image), the Inherent Recovery Time Objective (time to critical for the singular process) and the Resultant Recovery Time Objective (time to critical for the larger process “group”).