Security and Emergency Management in Building Business Continuity Planning - Assignment Example

Introduction to Methodologies, Building Your Business Continuity Planning in Safety, Security and Emergency Management Essay 29th May, Introduction To Methodologies, Building Your Business Continuity Planning in Safety, Security and Emergency Management The research is about the aftermath of decision taken when the company is struck with a sudden disaster. These incidents can include earthquakes, floods, terrorist attack and in our case fire. We need to make our systems so effective that even when we are unable to use our resources due to outbreak of fire we can still ensure to deliver our services. What are the few possible steps that can be taken to prevent the destruction of data and to keep a backup; for this purpose we can have two plants running the same data sources, these systems would not only have the data access but at the same time after an outburst of uninvited event they are prepared for immediate effects. The questions that need to be address before the company faces such issues are; how much time will take to recover from the disaster, what is the impact of the disaster, what is the data loss and critical factors. Business organization includes any and all types of organization that provides products or services, either to individual customers or business entities. All of these organizations are equally exposed to the risk of being damages through external and unforeseen sources. Business organizations today are surrounded by competition, these competition puts them under pressure cut costs, to increase efficiency and customer demands and to finish it all we need to have backup for our business and the backup for the business is also called business continuity plan. These plans can be time consuming and expensive at the same time. There are certain ways introduced to ensure that these targets can be met without much waste of the resources. Corporate Governance is considered as one of the ways that can be implemented to reduced risk. All businesses need to take extra care to protect their critical business operations and its resources. We would focus on the “After the Fire; First interstate bank, Los Angeles”. The case study was published in 1998 in California. The case study revolves around one of the most lethal fires that took place on the 5th May, 1988. The fire took place in First Interstate Bank, which was a 62 story high building. The fire was able to destroy 5 stories. During the fire 1 one the victims was killed and another 35 were injured. It was considered to be one of the most destructive high fires in the history of United States. During the fire it took a total of 383 members of the fire department from 64 different companies in fighting the fire. During the fire fight it involved many different kinds of unusual challenges, and the most important of them was the sheer magnitude of the fire that went out of control; and in order to protect the surrounding areas addition help was called from 20 companies from Los Angeles and another 4 from the surrounding cities. The building was 62 stories high and was made out of steel frame, and if the building was coated with fire resistive material it would have helped in prevention of damage. One of the reasons that the fire went out of control was the late notification by the security of the building, and the notification was delayed by 15 minutes. The fire department was informed after activation and deactivation of the smoke detector several times; the automatic fire sprinklers were also installed in 90% of the building. One of the reasons that contributed to the quick spread of fire was the high combustible material present in the building, these were placed by the interior decorators, there were unaware of the unforeseen events that can take place and could contribute to high destruction of building materials. Few of the immediate effects were the main power pumps had been shut down creating issues in releasing water pressures, and reducing initial water pressure for immediate attack, the radio communications were disrupted, the telephone circuits were damaged by the fire and then the sprinkle of water making them unusable and the last of communication channels of sound-powered emergency phones were ineffective. During the fire extinguish operation 14 of the firemen were injured, out of a total of 400 team members, the use of protective hoods proved to be beneficial with respect to preventing any neck and ear burns, allowing the firefighters to attack with more confidence and power. That crew also used 30 minutes self-contained breathing apparatus to manage their time and avoid any over fatigue. These employees are also well trained in taking physical stress under such situations (Administration, 1988). Based on the situation that took place, the fire fighters report and other business activities it was decided that the business and the operations needs to be protected against any future damages. The lesson was also taken by other similar situation companies. It was defined that the safety measures has to be taken on the external and internal level; the external level includes the building infrastructure, it needs to be built by engineers ensuring that it can take on fire without any further damage to the property, it should also include other unforeseen destructive event that can take place including earthquakes, floods and cyclones etc. What implementations can be taken on the inner side of the building to ensure that the furniture and other material placed inside the office are not such equipment that can give rise to fire and aid in destruction of the building, the windows should be strong and fire resistance so that fire does not move from one floor to the another. Research undertaken by National Fire Protection Association during the years 2004-2008 reported that during the five years the teams have responded to 16,360 structure fires in stores and mercantile properties per year. These fires have caused an annual average death of 13 personals, along with 242 injuries and $ 648 Million in direct damage of property and other equipment. These stores include services such as barber and beauty shop, laundry and dry cleaning shops, service stations, vehicles and other repair sales, pet shops and related businesses (Evarts, 2011). It is also reported that fires that take place during business hours does less damage as compared to fire that takes place off duty business hours. It is reported that an average of $75,000 of property damaged is caused during the off duty hours as compared to $29,000 of property and equipment damage during business and working hours (Chronicle Guidance Publications, 2007). Few of the reasons quoted for the outburst of fire are cooking equipment which was responsible for 19% of the fires in stores; however only 6% of the property is damaged directly through cooking equipment, as compared to damage from electrical and lighting equipment which causes 12% of the property damage and 16% of the property is damaged through international causes. Although over the years the fire occupancy has decreased manifolds, which fell a drastic 57% from 1980 to 2010, amounting a cut of fire incidents from 37,500 to 16,200 fire incidents in the respective years. Companies and businesses needs to come up with ways to prevent the damage and ensure that such events do not affect their business activities in a drastic ways; in the age of competition it will become difficult for any industry to lose its market share because they were not prepared for such incidents. The few of the risk that might take place because the companies are not prepared for business continuity cycle includes the inability to serve the current customers, which will result in loss of opportunities and good will of the company. It will also result in financial loss due to the inability to process receivables, the late payment penalties, missed discounts, inability to update account balances and other related activities. It will also result in legal inability resulting from failure to satisfy contractual obligations and the most important risk is they might run out of business and other companies would take their market share because they were not prepared to take corrective action in time (National Fire Protection Association, 2014). The companies needs to establish a framework for evaluating business process and need to develop a focused approach to develop an effective business continuation plan, the plan develop need to be cost effective and at the same time would need to require minimum resources to ensure maximum output. The plan should include all the details of how that data and other sources will be protected, these include the building, the data, even the employees, file and interior decorticates and hardware used for work and everything in between. The risk has to be evaluated and managed at different levels these level includes the information technology, policies of the company, quality assurance of the products, general operations, competencies of the staff to deal under certain situations, managing change, managing fraud and loopholes in the internal control process, managing and maintaining a healthy environment and to equip the personal to be able to fight under any situations, that is to focus on training and development of the employees. The organizations also need to ensure that all stake holders are involved in the process because it is the management that gives the details of all the business activities and how they are exposed to risk whereas, the board and upper management take the decision on how to rectify them. These decisions are taken at strategic, financial, operational, commercial and technical level. Few of the lesson learned under fire incident and how can they be helpful in implementation of a business continuity strategy include; the sprinklers systems are effective and capable of dealing with a high level of fire, the un-sprinkled high-rise fires creates massive staffing requirements, the employees and fire fighters have to be physically fit to endure more pressure, High-rise incident command systems are very critical, communication needs to be improved, radio communications must be more effective, alarms should be active, protected elevators should be installed, a separate fire department should be established, fire protection system needs to be checked on regular basis, fire-proof vaults, backup machineries in other places and the operations needs to be defined to have a plan B in case of emergency implementations. References Administration, U. F. (1988). Interstate Bank Building Fire. Los Angeles, California: Homeland Security. Chronicle Guidance Publications (2007). Fire Fighters: Brief 69. Retrieved June 19, 2014, from http://www.chronicleguidance.com/client_images/catalog19626/pages/files/brief069.pdf Evarts, B. (2011). U.S. STRUCTURE FIRES IN STORES AND OTHER MERCANTILE PROPERTIES. USA: National Fire Protection Association. National Fire Protection Association (2014). National Fire Protection Association. London: National Fire Protection Association. Read More