Posted By Alison Gillings I am in the process of preparing an action plan for an identified threat to mission critical services. The threat being "site closure due to an HSE or environmental issue. I am having difficulties with my train of thought and cannot seem to relate to the more regularly identified threats, such as loss of utilities or IT services. Do other companies encompass such a threat and plan for in their contingency plans? Can anyone point me in the direction of information which I can use for the planning of this particular threat.

Posted By Jeffrey Watt Alison IMO you need an inter discipline working group meeting led by you and a senior menber of staff. Staff need to complete a questionairre before hand, asking things like what critical services they consider they have, how long they can get away with not delivering that function, how many staff they have with what skills who can cover other staff, can they work from another site, what IT is needed, what hard copy records are needed etc. Been through this recently and we discovered collectively we had made inaccurate assumptions about each others resilience. This was only discovered because so many participated from the ground up with the right amount of experience to challenge the generalities we assumed to be true. We are still at the input stage. Top team need to work out what is mission critical and feed all that info back down along with a work around plan. The same groups will then need to test that plan, e.g." 30 people can work from home, but only 5 have laptops, how do IT service that?" etc. Hope that helps Jeff

Posted By Alison Gillings Thank you all for your input. My initial post may have been slightly ambiguous. I was having difficulty compiling information to enable a plan for one particular threat. Site closure due to an incident which would involve working with a third party IE HSE. Alison

Posted By David Gault Alison, Hopefully you will find this helpful. Although it is tempting to look at major events that may close a site (and some good examples and advice are given in the other posts) you may find it useful to examine how small an incident has to be before the site suffers significant loss. For example if you have a manufacturing site and your packaging dept. has a small fire you may find that even after staff have returned to site the dept. cannot function properly due to smoke damage etc. (just an example). That in turn may not shut the site but it will have an impact on other areas and reduce you capacity to supply customers with goods. My point is that if you look for pinch points in the business then look at what events could prevent the team from working and what effect that would have on others you may find that very significant losses can be made from minor events. The temptation to look at major events that require a full scale evacuation can distract you from the the smaller (and possibly more realistic event) that can really damage the business. In short: Look for your critical employees, look for your critical tasks, ask yourself what can stop them in their tracks. Start with small events (e.g.could a spillage stop the task) and work you r way up rather than down. You may be surprised.

Posted By Raymond Rapp Alison Apart from a workplace fatality, the HSE could in issue a Prohibition Notice. This could affect the working of part or all the company. You do not stipulate what your industry is and therefore it is difficult to advise. However, there will probably be an overlap with other issues such as fire, flooding, gas leak and so on, which may render the business unfit to work in. Not sure causal factors need be individually identified, it is the consequence that is important. Ray