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Business Continuity Management

Interfacing will empower your organization to efficiently govern your business complexity and continuous transformation through process based quality, performance and compliance management solutions.
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Is Your Business Prepared for a Crisis?

Process Audit and Process Compliance

At any given moment, would your business be ready to adapt if an unexpected crisis or black swan event occurred today?

For those unfamiliar with the term, a black swan describes an occurrence of a rare event that brings with it, severe consequences. Black swan events will cause major economic disruption and can occur at any point in time.

The COVID-19 pandemic is an example of a rare event that has significantly affected the global economy, society, and daily activity for a specific period of time. To meet the terms of a black swan event, the crisis event must create chaos in the short term and because of that, subsequently drive major change to the aforementioned global economies etc. In short, it is a black swan event where none knew of the scale of impact foreseen in such a short period of time.

As black swans are difficult to predict, the only way to possibly prepare for the disruptive event would be to build robust systems in advance. For this purpose, an unprepared or complacent business, is a prime target to be compromised.

Your worst enemy during any crisis, exposing your vulnerability, is complacency. Combined with social media moving at the speed of light, your business can quickly go from a humble organization to the center of a major crisis within hours.

 

Business Continuity Management software solution

Interfacing’s Business Continuity Management (BCM) software solution provides organizations with the capabilities to anticipate, prepare, and respond to both internal and external disruptions more efficiently and proactively, whether for example it is a system outage, natural disaster event or a cyber-attack.

Our industry-leading software solution covers a broad spectrum of BCM tactics such as disaster recovery, business process recovery, incident management, quality management, emergency notifications and more. Our solution allows you to establish policies and objectives, implement controls and measures to manage risks, monitor performance and effectiveness of your BCM initiatives, and plan continuous improvement based on your objectives. You cannot schedule disasters, but you can surely plan to mitigate their effects. Let Interfacing help you build a resilient and holistic BCM system!

Download our BCM slidedeck here.
Process Audit and Process Compliance

The EPC toolkit provides organizations with:

Risk Assessment

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

AI & Incident Management

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Risk Assessment

Action Item & Incident Management

Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

Monitoring & Reporting

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Risk Assessment

Impact Diagrams:

Assessing an isolated risk may be easy, but assessing all collateral (upstream & downstream) associations to the risk for a comprehensive evaluation requires a bird’s-eye view to visualize your relevant processes. Impact diagrams allow users to select a department, service, rule or asset and view its collateral impact. By further analyzing your selection, you can drill-down into the most granular of detail to understand which associated processes, for example, would be affected by an incident, and pull up all data impacted by that incident; data such as roles, risks, controls, documents, etc.

Risk Impact Analysis (RIA):

Assess your processes within our tool and determine how much risk you are willing to accept to produce value within the risk appetite survey. Select an EPC object such as a process or control and calculate its impact, likelihood, and detectability; weighted averages on each radio button determine its overall risk and assessment. Define threats and hazards in the minutest of detail, down their associations; list all organizational units or employees at risk with one simple click. Perform assessments of business continuity risks impacting key processes and assets, produce effective KRIs from high quality data captured through surveys, and generate risk evaluation reports based on impact, likelihood, and detectability and associated controls.

Risk Assessment Report:

Generate real-time graphical charts from RIA data captured around your processes or controls within our risk assessment report. Filter your assessment report output by EPC module (e.g., process or control), EPC object (e.g., specific process or control within a module), and filter by date, as well, to generate visual live data demonstrating perceived risk data vs. desired risk appetite for any selected object. Our powerful tool transforms any raw data into user-friendly dashboards and reports providing management with maximum insight about their desired levels of risk.

Business Continuity Plan (BCP)

bcm, business continuity, eqms, dqms
bcm, business continuity, eqms, dqms

Business Impact Analysis (BIA):

Strategy and risk questions within the BIA survey enable you to fully define a process’s impact and further develop a robust business continuity strategy. Explicit questions help you define critical business processes, activities, key resources and assets. All BIA & RIA data is captured and stored within the EPC to be exported into custom or pre-built reports. Select fields dynamically prepopulate based on user profile. Associate fully-created processes from your repository to your BIA, or if your processes don’t already exist, create them on-the-fly. Within the survey, select BIA fields capture RTO and RPO, assigning criticality scoring and calculations of recovery objectives to your process. Additionally, take advantage of our ‘Alternative Processes’ tab; in case of an emergency, your alternative processes mapped within your repository kick into gear, allowing your entire workforce to adjust to a back-up method of working easily and effectively.

BIA Dashboards:

BIA dashboards can be quickly generated based off real-time data. Users are able to view charts that graphically display your number of critical vs. non-critical macro-processes or number of processes by RTO (less than 2hrs, less than 24hrs, less than 48hrs, for example – values are fully customizable). Moreover, all charts and dashboards are easily embedded within forms, so that you can easily retrieve and access to information whenever and wherever you need.

End-to-end Business Continuity Planning (BCP):

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) allows organizations to establish mission-critical operations and services to a fully functional level in case of disruptions. We support your whole BCM lifecycle management from BCP creation to execution – BCPs are created and stored in the same repository as BIAs and RIAs; meanwhile, access BIA and RIA at your fingertips to accelerate the creation of effective BCPs within minutes – all necessary information has never been easier to find!

Create and maintain BCP from pre-built templates in BIA, associate BCP to processes, assets, asset owners, controls, etc., and calculate net risk priority and control effectiveness. All BCPs are stored in a module and can be revisited or maintained over time. Such reusability can greatly benefit users to tweak an existing BCP for various purposes and usages. Moreover, our mobile responsive feature allows you to access to BCP and crisis reports anytime, anywhere.

Offline Hard Copies Automatically Generated

Should you lose internet access or mobile access, your documents will remain accessible 24/7. 

Access Your BCM Plans from ANYWHERE at ANYTIME via Mobile

Whether your crisis team are on location or off-site, they will continue to access all BCM plans via mobile access, anywhere at anytime!

Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP)

Process/Disaster Recovery Plan Creation:

To create a Process Recovery or DRP, users can select a disaster type and classify data according to criticality and severity, then determine cause and trigger of disaster, RTO and ROP fields repopulated from BIA. Afterwards, users are able to generate contract list, schedule action plans in the form of action items, assign responsibilities and simulate end-to-end testing. Such DRPs are also reusable across one or many BCPs to minimum data migration and increase efficiency.

Process/Disaster Recovery Plan Execution:

After initiate a DRP, users can then simulate or launch the plan in real-time. Our DRP execution module sends mass notifications to critical resources following a crisis event. The goal is to make sure that action items are routed to AI owners, and deadlines along with detailed step-by-step procedures are communicated to key employees throughout DRP execution.

Process/Disaster Recovery Plan Close:

After AI owners complete AI and attach evidence, all AI completion must be reviewed in order to fully close the DRP. In the DRP form, users have access to full DRP information including contact list, recovery team, AI list, process history with previous details, as well as who sent, received, modified, completed and approved which AIs, etc.

Test Execution Associated to DRP/BCP:

Our DRP form can trigger test execution if AIs have failed, and forms can easily be reassigned if higher authority level sign-off is required. Failed tests may trigger item process to start. Within the Test Execution form, users can establish responsibility by roles, view/edit/add sample results, determine sample effectiveness via yes/no or pass/fail radio buttons, send notifications to managers, trigger escalation to AI from failed test results, track status of AI available in real-time.

Action Items & Incident Management

Action Items Creation:

As one of the most common problem management best practices, action items enable organizations to be more proactive when it comes to BCM. Our solution allows users to trigger action items via failed tests, incidents, or ad hoc requests. If the action item owner is away while the action item has been assigned to him, our system may automate an escalation request. After a given number of days, the task may automatically be sent to a different role of equal responsibility. Additionally, an action item owner may request one extension on his action item, as per the company’s business requirements.

Action Items Assignment:

As action items are being created, define specific criteria such as Action Item name, owner, action type, and priority, etc. Action Items are assigned to specific resources with specified deadlines and levels of priority, as well as communicated via automated/scheduled mass notifications (email, SMS, etc.).

Action Item Review:

After Action Item assignment, Action Item owners collect and store action item evidence on completion, also run reports on any overdue or pending actions. 100% mobile and tablet responsive, our solutions enable users to download all attachments for review purpose and ensure approval cycles for compliance purpose. On the other hand, process owners can, in turn, indicate their progress throughout these endeavors, review and approve Action Items, track real-time status, and give their electronic signatures.

Incident Management:

Our IcM allows real-time incident reporting, tracking and analysis, supports multiple geographic locations, and enables follow-up and root cause analysis. Users are capable of creating incident ad hoc – if it is accepted after first review, incident process closes; if it is rejected, an incident investigation will be conducted to identify root cause and risks, and failed analysis results may trigger escalation to Action Items. Besides, users can set multiple review and approval cycles to ensure accuracy and compliance of BCM.

Monitoring & Reporting

Cross-application Visibility & Reusability:

Our BCM application features a single web-based interface and a powerful relational database that connects business functions and processes, identifies risks, establishes priorities, automates test executions and generates continuity plans all from within one repository. All modules are interrelated and supplement each other’s functions, simplifying the complexity of creating and managing a fully transparent BCM program. Data from one module easily flows and integrate into the other, offering highly flexible functionality across applications.

Approval Cycles & Notifications:

Our application prompts responsible employees on a timely basis to review content and ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of your BCM programs. Users can automate and accelerate approval cycles by setting multiple rounds of reviews. Later, user- or role-based task notifications can be scheduled periodically or recurrently.  With complete mobile functionality, users can also trigger escalations based on pending or overdue tasks via Email or SMS alerts. Evidence of BCM supervisory review and electronic signatures further ensure compliance. Users are also capable of integrating data from our application using REST APIs with 3rd party systems.

BCM Dashboards & Reports:

Our BCM dashboards and reports can be quickly and easily generated based on dynamic data. BCM dashboards allow users to view all processes and their statuses (e.g. urgent, internal service, external service, SLA, RTO…), view top processes at risk, view most cited process, and drill down into macro-processes. BCM reports, covering risk reports, incident reports and impact reports, support exporting collected data with a single click in multiple formats (e.g. Excel, PDF, etc.) and customizing reports with your own logo. Such visibility and configurability help monitor test progression and resolved incidents in real-time, also understand related impacts associated with any reported object and keep your crucial processes functioning in time of a disruption.

Maintenance notifications:

Our application prompts responsible employees on a timely basis to review content to ensure compliance is maintained efficiently and effectively. Users can automate and accelerate approval cycles by setting multiple rounds of reviews. Later, user- or role-based task notifications can be scheduled periodically or recurrently.  With complete mobile functionality, users can also trigger escalations based on pending or overdue tasks via Email or SMS alerts. Users are also capable of integrating data from our application using REST APIs with 3rd party systems.
Learn more about other Modules
Learn more about other Modules

A Crisis Can Take on Any Appearance

Crises come in a variety of forms. To make matters more challenging, with social media operating 24/7, if it’s a major internal issue, you may not have the luxury of keeping it out of the public eye for long. Local media would be all over it and then some. If you haven’t built up solid relationships with local media outlets, you may want to start now.

Whether the crisis involves an accident, natural disaster, economic or pandemic event, or even stolen private data information, you will need to be prepared to respond with various action plans. This means preparing for as many scenarios as you can imagine and put your best plans in place for each one.

The benefit of integrating the Enterprise Process Center is that even if a crisis comes that you haven’t identified, you will still be able to respond using one or more of the BCM tactics in place.

Implementing the Enterprise Process Center BCM tactics are well worth their weight in making your organization respond to an crisis event faster and smoother in the long run.