Business Continuity Plan And Sustainability (Retail & Distribution) - Business Assignment Help

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Business Continuity Plan and Sustainability (Retail & Distribution) 

1 Introduction 

“Businesses that overcome disasters (natural & manmade) without any operational disturbance,  service suspensions & keep the customer satisfied are those who plan proactively. Leaders in these organizations develop business continuity strategy for sustainability.” (Montgomery, 2014) 

In the modern world, organizations are exposed to a lot of risk factors that can disrupt their day-to-day operations in different ways and challenge their sustainability. To prevent businesses from these risks and to recover from any natural calamity businesses must develop risk assessment management (RAM) and business continuity management (BCM) system. This report will discuss how a business continuity plan (BCP) or framework can help organizations up and running during any disaster. Today most organizations are aware of the importance of BCP in their businesses but at the same are not including it in their business strategy. 

BCM plays a vital role in different parts of operations. In this report, the focus will be on the retail and distribution sector. According to (Harrison, n.d.), minutes of downtime in retail and distribution could cause heavy revenue loss and will damage brand image. In today’s pandemic situation most of the retail and distribution channels are facing lots of challenges, unable to deliver customer satisfaction and are vulnerable to risk leading to lasting damage to brand image and could be a threat to their sustainability.

1.1. Background 

“As per (How Natural Disasters Impact Businesses, 2018), disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes,  avalanches, etc can disturb supply chain operations, employees might not be able to come for work and equipment could be damage. In any such event, businesses might find a way to react to the reality, and  that’s why advance planning for such a situation is a high priority for a proactive growth plan.” 

In recent years different types of natural calamity and epidemics have interrupted businesses locally. In the year 2020, pandemic Covid-19 has affected worldwide operations, not only retail and distribution numerous operations such as manufacturing, supply chain, and logistics, etc. Due to worldwide lockdown, all these operations were shutdown for months and there was a lack of supplies which resulted in shortage and quality issues lead to customer complaints. 

This pandemic proved that threats to businesses can occur anytime, from many different situations and possibly from intentional or unintentional sources. Hence, BCM and RAM approach aids to analyze the range of risks related to operational details which can help to work more cautiously to deliver exceptional customer satisfaction. 

To fulfill the consumer needs retail and distribution channels are dependent on numerous processes and are linked to other organizational divisions. BCM helps the organization to understand the importance of each process and concern responsible person required for smooth operations. For the retail and distribution industry embedding business continuity management in their policy will help in a proactive approach and will keep day-to-day operations up and running, BCP helps step-by-step planning to develop a business continuity management strategy.

According to (Kulathunga, 2020), the unstable experience of pandemic worldwide the retail industry is facing challenges and the number of sales is dropping day by day to a new low. 

In today’s competitive era organizations compete to maintain their market position and sustainability.  Leaders with good leadership are responsible to take fast and proactive decisions, a small mistake can have a huge impact on organizations' performance and growth. In order to keep core business activities functioning during any natural calamity or disaster, one of the best solutions is the business continuity management approach. 

Due to the pandemic, a worldwide lockdown was implemented and the whole was saturated for months. In the  Kingdom of Bahrain, the retail and distribution industry were the most affected areas especially brick and mortar. According to (Lee Yohn, 2020), during this pandemic time and economic crisis, the difficulties faced by brick and mortar retailers have been increasing at tremendous speed. To survive this crisis retailers, need to reimagine their baseline requirements to take customer satisfaction to next level.

1.3 Research Aims and Objectives 

The primary aim of the study is to analyze the importance of business continuity plan to reinforce  sustainability during natural disaster or pandemic

2 Literature Review 

To prove the importance of a business continuity plan, will use a systematic literature review to collect,  analyze and evaluate existing literature related to business impact analysis. According to (Grant and  Booth, 2009), literature review refers to the published materials related to any topic available for evaluation which includes past research findings, and which may or may not help the researcher to use this information for quality assessment.  

The current study aims to prove how businesses to consider risk assessment and its impact on business.  How including business continuity plan into the business strategy can help the organization to support a realistic and systematic approach for business continuity during any natural disaster or pandemic. 

The literature review for this report is focused on already published research papers, journal articles, online library, google scholars. Below is a list of few published articles which will aid to get a wide interdisciplinary outlook about the business continuity management approach. 

3 Methodology 

To prepare this report a qualitative research approach is been proposed. According to (Hennink, Hutter, and Bailey, 2010), it is not easy to define qualitative research, it is a blanket term which covers a vast range of theories and techniques. In qualitative research different types of methods such as in-depth interviews,  focus group discussions, content analysis, etc are used. 

The interpretive research method will help in the forming of research design. Qualitative research is multimethod in focus which involves an interpretative representational approach to its subject matter. In this researchers study things in its natural settings, attempting to make sense, or explain circumstance in terms of the sense people lead to them, (Denzin and Lincoln, 2005). 

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