Don’t Kid Yourself – Will Your Operation Continue During A Pandemic?

By Pete Basiliere, Gartner

The media attention paid to the worldwide swine flu outbreak has dropped off, although H1N1 cases continue to develop. The World Heath Organization’s alert level remains at 5 on its scale of 6. Now, the swine flu outbreak is not yet a pandemic and may never become one. However, a true pandemic could cause absenteeism rates of 40% or higher at your enterprise, business partners and suppliers, resulting in severe operational disruptions.

Transaction documents are the lifeblood of every enterprise. Whether in published in physical or electronic form, they provide the cash flow needed to sustain operations. The possible consequences of a missing, incomplete or outdated print and mail recovery plan are potentially disastrous for your enterprise, including the failure to produce “mission critical” financial transaction documents such as invoices, statements and checks.

As a result, infrastructure and operations managers must have business interruption recovery strategies for the printed and electronic documents critical to their enterprises’ operations. Yet a recent Gartner study found that only 25% of respondents have a business continuity management / disaster recover plan in place. Worse still, most of these plans do not cover all applications, assuming the disaster would be short-lived. For these reasons, I encourage you to test your print and mail business continuity response plans:

·         Immediately initiate rigorous, ongoing and well-documented testing to isolate and remediate weaknesses and voids in your publishing operation’s continuity plans.

·         Along with the print and mail operations, enterprises in all regions and across all industries must review existing pandemic response plans for every part of the organization.

·         Monitor www.pandemicflu.gov and other government and public-health sources to determine what actions are appropriate to ensure workforce safety and continued business operations.

Swift recovery from an interruption to your company’s production of critical customer documents and other communications is critical to its continued operations. The potential for a pandemic profoundly illustrates the need for complete, comprehensive communications between your enterprise and suppliers.

Gartner has communicated with major print and mail technology providers to understand the steps they are taking to support their production print and mail customers. Yet, while major technology providers have initiated their pandemic response plans, many print/mail operations have failed to do so, with potentially drastic results such as the failure to mail critical bills, checks and regulated correspondence.

If this hasn’t happened already, print/mail operations managers must meet immediately with not only hardware and software suppliers but also paper, envelope and other providers to ensure they have the ability to meet service level agreements should a widespread H1N1 outbreak occur. Ensure your suppliers clearly lay out their plans and inform you now of what will happen if their resources become too stretched to provide 100% support. Lastly, I highly recommend that you continue the supplier meetings on a regular basis until the pandemic risk has been mitigated. Focus on your and your suppliers’ status and whether service level agreements are being met or jeopardized.

Test now and establish continuous communications with your suppliers now to ensure everyone understands your priorities, your suppliers' capabilities and whether transaction document print and mail service levels will be met.

Lastly, visit Gartner’s free and up to date Print, Mail and IT Pandemic Research Reports and Blog.

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Join Pete at the Print & Imaging Summit

Dec. 6 – 8, 2009

Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles, Calif.

Join OutputLinks and Pete Basiliere for this uniquely interactive forum that brings together Vendors, industry Analysts and Office and Production Print executives to help them take the critical leap forward in technology expertise required to remain relevant and valuable to their rapidly transforming organizations.

To attend as a hosted Decision-Maker, please complete this application: www.print-imagingsummit.com/us/participate/qualify.php.

Vendors, contact Gwen Krauss, 603-471-4295, gkrauss@everythingchannel.com.