Business continuity

Business Continuity Plan
Name
Institution Affiliation
Abstract
The paper talks about some of the risks that were experienced in the Engro firm after the occurrence of the fire outbreak in the head office. For instance, some of these risks were the losses experienced such as the documents that were burned and some of the difficulties that the company might have gone through as a result of these loses. The main aim of business continuity has also been discussed as well as the things that were omitted since the ERP was not applied. And also the paper has explained the issues concerning the reasons why the organization deviated from the application of the Business Continuity plan and why they negated the use of the Enterprise Resource Planning. The overall plan and its implementation have also been discussed as well as the lesson that an individual can learn from the Engro organization and the disaster that they encountered in the head office.
Keywords: risks, documents, losses, ERP, business continuity plan.

What were the risks faced by Engro after the fire had left its head office in ruins?
The documents lost in the fire brought a lot of effects on various things. For instance, there were worries from the auditors that the company might breach the statutory provisions in the ordinance of the Companies that are relating to the minimum period that a publicly-listed company’s records that were required to be retained (Ahmed, 2009). Everything was destroyed by the fire, all servers and computers were a complete loss.

These contained all the company’s daily transactions; in case their systems weren’t backed up; all of the data that were contained in these devices would also be lost.
Explain the purpose of the Business Continuity (Disaster Recovery) Plan. What features were omitted from the plan?
The plan’s purpose is for the documentation to be available for recovery steps put in place in the event of another disaster hindering the operations of the company. The steps will allow the company to resume key IT operations quickly as long as these operations are followed step by step. However, the important feature that the Engro omitted was the procedure that could be used to store their vital documents and also how to safeguard and retrieve these documents.
The systems were not integrated, and this made it simpler for Engro to recover from the disaster: Does this negate the concept of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)? Why, in your opinion, did Engro deviate from the Business Continuity (Disaster Recovery) Plan?
In my opinion, this act negated the ERP concept since the ERP is a business management system that is used to integrate all the business facets such as planning, sales, manufacturing, and marketing (Curtis, 2006). There were several systems in the Engro’s office that included the planning, distribution, accounting, manufacturing, and shipping that would require the ERP concept. Therefore, this shows that it was negated.
Evaluate the overall plan and implementation.
The firm has a plan outline, but there are several thoughts that could be added through it. I do wonder in case they ever had in mind the risk of fire affecting the backup site and even the home where the backups were. In that case, therefore, I feel the IT department need to make a plan action and assign duties to different people in teams in case of disaster. These teams assigned the duties will be responsible for informing the other people what is going on during the disaster and the action that the people should take.
What best practices or lessons can you learn from Engro, and how might you apply those to your organization? Provide specific examples to support your observations.
I’ve learned that it’s not safe to keep all the valuable documents on a single onsite with the assumption that no harm can affect them. According to my organization, however, it’s effective to make sure that these important documents are backed up (Ahmed, 2009). For instance, we would use the offline servers to store the documents such as the hard disks. This can be done through the run of automatic backups that are performed on a daily basis. There would be several sources of backups in the organization to give no room for errors that might occur.
References
Ahmed, M. B. (2009). Engro Chemicals Pakistan Limited—Business disaster overcome. (Ivey Publishing Case No. 909-E24). 1-18.
Curtis, S. (2006). ERP Integration. Journal of Business Enterprises 8(3). 54-59.