Business Continuity For Dummies

Deciding What’s Important to Your Retail Business

The first thing you need to do when building your BC system is to consider exactly what your retail business needs. As we discuss in this section, BC for the retailer concerns the supply of goods to your customers and inevitably centres on stock, outlet and theft – you don’t want to waste scarce time and resources on protecting anything that isn’t essential.

You identify your own business’s precise key products and services, and the critical activities that underpin them, through a Business Impact Analysis (BIA). We talk about this process in Chapter 4, and it’s the first step to take in building the foundations of your BC system. After you’ve identified where the vulnerabilities of your business lie, you can think about how best to support them.

Riot!

The inner-city disturbances of summer 2011 are an example of how an unexpected incident can have widespread and devastating impacts on retailers. Over several days, shops in areas of London and cities across England were looted, raided and vandalised to varying extents. Whole streets were damaged and lines of shops were left in bad repair. Many had to close for several days, losing immediate business, but things were worst for the retailers who had stock and premises destroyed and those that were unable to return to business.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) Retail Crime Survey 2011 estimates that the riots affected more than 20,000 staff in retail businesses, and that the average ...