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Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning

Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning is the leading professional journal publishing peer-reviewed articles and case studies written by and for business continuity and emergency managers.

Each quarterly 100-page issue combines provocative thought-leadership pieces – which expand what can be achieved with business continuity and emergency management – with detailed, actionable advice and ‘lessons learned’, showing how programmes have been specified, designed, implemented, tested and updated, as well as how interruptions, emergencies and exercises have been managed in practice. The journal focuses on key strategic and business issues – not technical minutiae – with no advertorial or advertising.

Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning  is listed, indexed and abstracted in PubMed, Scopus and Cabells' Directories of Publishing Opportunities.  

Each issue analyses the latest practice, innovative techniques and leading-edge thinking in:

• Identifying and preparing for new areas of risk
• Business impact analysis
• Defining and protecting mission critical operations
• Crisis communications and decision making
• Reputation risk management
• Natural and environmental risks
• Supply chain risk management
• Pandemics and other public health threats
• Making the business case for plan investments
• Case studies of how plans respond in practice to interruptions and emergencies
• Public-private partnerships and intra-agency planning
• Aligning plans with organisational goals
• Drafting and implementing plans
• Training and awareness programmes
• Plan tests, exercises and updates
• Security and public safety
• Telecoms, records and data infrastructure resilience

Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning publishes in-depth, end-user focused articles and real world case studies written by experienced business continuity and emergency managers who provide insight into current and best practice at blue chip corporations, central and local government and humanitarian agencies. Authors documenting their practical experience, problems encountered, solutions adopted and 'lessons learned' in previous issues have included:

Business continuity managers from: ABN AMRO; Air New Zealand; Amway; Associated Press; BAE Systems; Bank of England; Blue Cross and Blue Shield; BP; Canary Wharf Group; CenturyLink; Cisco; Citigroup; City University, London; Credit Suisse; Cushman & Wakefield; Deutsche Bank; DHL;  DTE Energy; eBay; Emirates Group; Ernst & Young; FedEx; Gap; Greater Toronto Airports Authority; Hewlett-Packard; Intel; Johns Hopkins University; Kaiser Permanente; KPMG; Lockheed Martin; Merck & Co; Pfizer; PwC; Sun Microsystems; Target; Union Bank; US Department of State; US Securities & Exchange Commission; Verizon; Vodafone; Walgreen Co; Warner Bros; Wells Fargo; Zurich Financial Services.

Emergency managers from : American Red Cross; Boston Emergency Medical Services; Calgary Emergency Management Agency; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; ChicagoFIRST; East Central Florida Planning Council; FEMA; Government of Western Australia; Health Protection Agency; Los Angeles County EMS Agency; Merseyside Police; New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation; NHS London; Orlando International Airport; Port of Seattle; Santa Rosa County Division of Emergency Management, Florida; Scottish Government; Southern Methodist University; Surrey County Council; UCLA Health System; US Department of Homeland Security; UNISDR; US Army; World Health Organization.

Essential source material for Departmental Heads, Managing Directors, SVPs, EVPs, VPs, Directors and Senior Managers of:

• Business continuity
• Emergency management
• Risk management
• Emergency planning
• Business resilience
• Disaster recovery
• Crisis management
• Emergency response
• Public health
• Environment, health and safety
• Homeland security
• Financial stability and market infrastructure
• IT and information security; as well as
• CEOs and other C-Suite executives
• Service providers, auditors and consultants

“I find the content of Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning to be up to date, easy to follow, and applicable to the professional in the field, the student in the class, and the academic.  This journal offers a mix of articles from many disciplines in a manner that allows the professional to utilise the data immediately. I have personally used material from this journal on multiple occasions, both in my academic and professional endeavours.”

" Journal of Business Continuity & Emergency Planning  fills a significant dearth in the peer-reviewed, international perspective emergency management literature."

"In a world where business continuity is now an integral part of everyday life, the Journal provides a holistic look across all industries at how others manage risk. The insights provided are thought provoking and very practical. During its years of publication, the Journal has grown from strength to strength in both its readership and quality and depth of the challenging articles."

"Written by and for the professional, it provides me with the kind of practical, real-use cases I can apply in my job."

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Business continuity in the COVID-19 emergency: A framework of actions undertaken by world-leading companies

Affiliations.

• 1 University of Salento, Campus Ecotekne, Via Monteroni s.n., 73100 Lecce (LE), Italy.
• 2 Centre for Collaborative Research (CCR), Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, Rehtorinpellonkatu 3, FI-20500 Turku, Finland.
• PMID: 33558777
• PMCID: PMC7859707
• DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2021.02.020

The COVID-19 emergency has urged companies to operate in new ways to face supply chain interruptions, shifts in customer demand, and risks to workforce health. The organizational ability to respond to critical contingencies is crucial for business leaders in the perspective of continuing business. In our research, we investigate the actions undertaken by 50 world-leading corporations to respond to the pandemic. Applying content analysis to web pages and social network posts, we extract 77 actions related to 13 sub-areas and integrate these into a five-level framework that encompasses operations, customer, workforce, leadership, and community-related responses. We also describe six illustrative company examples of how the emergency can generate opportunities for creating new value. The study advances the scholarly discussion on the impact of emergencies on business continuity and can help leaders define response strategies and actions in the current challenge.

Keywords: Business continuity; COVID-19; Framework; Operations; Responses; Value creation; Workforce.

© 2021 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc.

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Business continuity through customer engagement in sustainable supply chain management: outlining the enablers to manage disruption

• Research Article
• Published: 08 October 2021
• Volume 29 , pages 14999–15017, ( 2022 )

Cite this article

• Amrinder Kaur 1 ,
• Ashwani Kumar 2 &
• Sunil Luthra   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7571-1331 3  

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Business continuity in disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic involves sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) with limited resources and risks for the well-being and prosperity of stakeholders and customers involved with limited environmental effects. The purpose of the paper is to outline enablers in customer engagement that supports SSCM in times of disruption like the COVID-19 pandemic. This research uses an extensive literature review followed by academic and industry practitioners’ opinions to identify customer engagement enablers in SSCM for business continuity. Hybrid stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and rough set numbers rank customer engagement enablers that support SSCM in disruption. The research builds on stakeholder theory and the sustainability framework for economic performance through non-economic aspects. The research concludes that the focus on agility for target customers through collaboration and information sharing in SSCM will support business continuity. It shall support decision-making in the supply chain in uncertainties. Engagement with stakeholders leads to focused execution in response to customer demand through faster communication and crucial information sharing, thus eliminating bottlenecks for business continuity.

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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is a disruption that witnessed massive health scare, economic recession with plunging demand, business discontinuity and in general, slowing down of economic activities (Carlsson-Szlezak et al. 2020 ; Jayaram et al. 2020 ). Business continuity (Cerullo and Cerullo 2004 ; Herbane et al. 2004 ) has supply chain management (SCM) as its intrinsic part (Schätter et al. 2019 ; Shashi et al. 2019 ) as, during disruptions, the movement of resources and value additions through goods/services from both the demand and supply side gets affected. SCM is an efficient movement of resources and information and assesses demand (Skjoett-Larsen et al. 2003 ; Sharma et al. 2020 ). However, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the vulnerability of global supply chains (Kumar 2020 ), with lesser margins to absorb errors and a faltering of economies worldwide along with closure of businesses (Building a More Resilient ICT Supply Chain: Lessons Learned during the COVID-19 Pandemic 2020 ; Magdin 2021 ).

For a long time, organisations’ focus had been on cost and inventory optimisation, supplier strategies and lean inventory, just in time process, focusing on critical node suppliers only (Seuring and Müller 2008b ; Butner 2010 ; Kilpatrick and Barter 2020 ). Disruption by the pandemic demonstrated the vulnerabilities of SC and businesses (Shammi et al. 2020 ; Silverthorne 2020 ). Survival and rebounding had been easy for organisations with an integrated approach with customers through structures, technologies and communities and shared identity (Papageorgiou 2009 ; Abdelnour et al. 2020 ). The organisations that sustained themselves well in the pandemic are the ones that created a sustainable and resilient supply chain. For instance, the resilient SCM supported business continuity in global companies like Nestle, which reportedly saw growth during the pandemic (Kumar 2020 ) like other digital and healthcare businesses (Abdelnour et al. 2020 ). However, the pandemic affected growth and economic activity especially in emerging economies like India, Bangladesh and many countries leading to high unemployment, lower gross domestic product (GDP) and closure of businesses (Shammi et al. 2020 ).

Business continuity in extreme disruption like pandemics and climate change is significant as 90% of businesses globally are small and medium enterprises (SME). The World Bank reports that formal SME contributes around 40% of GDP in emerging economies (Small and Medium Enterprises and Finance 2020 ) while the rest is in the informal economy. Emerging economies are differentiated from the matured markets by their per capita income, limited infrastructure and growth (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ). Businesses in emerging economies have lesser access to finance, technology and knowledge to deal with business disruptions than developed economies (Szekely and Kemanian 2016 ; Sneader and Singhal 2021 ). The supply chain is now global (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ) while integrating the local vendors, suppliers and other customers. Business continuity depends on effective collaboration with different customers, including vendors and suppliers, to cater to the market’s needs and demand (Chopra et al. 2011 ; Alicke and Strigek 2020 ). Emerging economies are an essential link of the global supply chains as manufacturing, production and a host of development activities are based in these economies (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ).

SSCM emphasises the triple bottom line (Elkington 1999 ) with people, profit and the planet. People involving local communities, internal and external customers (Kaur and Bhardwaj 2019 ; Kiron et al. 2015 ) and stakeholders’ collaboration are crucial to managing organisational activities (Seuring and Muller 2008a ; Silvestre et al. 2018 ). The people or social aspect of SCM is vital due to the complexity of supply chains (Mani et al. 2016 ; Govindan et al. 2021 ), and value creation involves collaboration for relational terms between different entities of available resources and capabilities (Caldwell et al. 2017 ). The relation coordination supports performance enhancement with different entities (Roehrich et al. 2019 ), and is affected by a lack of goal alignment, effective governance mechanism, unethical practices and knowledge asymmetry between the different parties (Kalra et al. 2021 ).

Customer engagement builds a shared identity (Grewal et al. 2017 ) with internal and external customers to achieve organisation’s economic performance (Al-Dmour et al. 2019 ) and also respond effectively to global and potential risk (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ). Carter and Rogers’s ( 2008 ) conceptual framework on sustainability involving the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social aspects concludes strategic and effective coordination for competitiveness, and resilience (Seuring and Muller 2008b ) of focal organisation and supply chain.

Disruptions are long-term and short-term disturbances (Nikolopoulos et al. 2020 ), affecting organisations’ day-to-day activities and ability to achieve short-term and long-term goals. It can vary in nature, type and frequency but affect SC operations. For instance, service failure is a short-term disruption (Zheng et al. 2008 ), and disasters like flood, fire at a manufacturing facility and pandemic can have effect on more than one entity in a supply chain (Azadegan et al. 2020 ) causing a delay in deliveries, affecting revenues, sales and workforce utilisation with ultimate effect on an organisation’s position in the market (Ivanov and Dolgui 2020 ). SSCM is also the management of high-impact, high-risk, low-frequency disruptions like the one caused in the COVID-19 pandemic (Li and Zobel 2020 ). The COVID-19 pandemic (Nikolopoulos et al. 2020 ) that affected businesses worldwide need effective integration and coordination for business continuity through identification of critical enablers by decision-makers(Alicke and Strigek 2020 ; Degnarain 2020 ; Evans et al. 2017 ). Stakeholders (Herbane et al. 2004 ; McKnight and Linnenluecke 2016 ) play the essential role in SSCM in times of threats and significant disruptions. Thus, safety, scarcity of resources and decisions related to stakeholders need to be considered (Carter and Rogers 2008 ). Engagement with customers, closing the supply chain loops (Kazancoglu et al. 2020 ) and supporting greater customer satisfaction/loyalty, is essential for business continuity (Kumar et al. 2013 ).

Researchers assert that many approaches support and are put into practice to contain risk and maintain business continuity in SCM, like reducing the complexity of the supply chain’s nodes and network, relying on the stored inventory and building additional capacities (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ). However, stakeholders’ strategic priorities act as barriers to resilience and business continuity (Ali et al. 2017 ). Also, emerging economies’ integration and coordination are affected by a lack of awareness, knowledge and finance (Bag et al. 2018 ).

The uncertainty of COVID-19 increased the instances of hoarding, storage (Jabbour and Jabbour 2020 ) with customers and muted demand with disintegrated supply chains. Identification of the enablers that support the ability of organisations to respond by more integration (Wankmüller and Reiner 2019 ) will lead to efficient management of resources and decision-making vital for business continuity. This identification of enablers is vital for emerging economies that deal with climate changes like earthquakes and floods, and lack knowledge and financial prowess to draft a response to ensure economic performance (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ).

Identification for prioritisation of customer engagement enablers in SSCM for business continuity leads to research questions which further became the objectives explored in the research. The first research question had been to identify if economic performance can be maintained through collaboration and integration among different customers or entities in the supply chain in times of supply chain disruption . And what are the enablers for engagement that can support in times of disruption for business continuity. Mani et al. ( 2016 ) assert the stakeholder and resource-based theory in social sustainability to support decision-makers utilising their resources and capabilities along with other customers and partners to create a sustainable advantage. Thus, the other research question was if these enablers can be ranked and prioritised for effective utilisation of resources and value creation to manage disruption in the supply chain. The conceptual sustainability framework by Carter and Rogers ( 2008 ) was referred which focused on the importance of achieving economic performance by integrating non-economic factors. Hence, the research objectives for identifying and prioritising the customer engagement enablers for managerial implications to support decisions and practices for business continuity are as below:

RO1: To identify the enablers of customer engagement in SSCM to manage disruption for business continuity.

RO2: To rank and prioritise the enablers of customer engagement in SSCM.

RO3: To enhance the value utilisation of resources more responsibly as we move forward, focusing on customer engagement in a sustainable supply chain.

An extensive literature review was carried out as per the research objectives, followed by academic and industry practitioners’ opinions to identify customer engagement enablers in SSCM for business continuity. Hybrid stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) and rough set numbers rank customer engagement enablers supporting SSCM in disruption. The research is significant as it builds on the earlier approaches of stakeholder theory to support business continuity (Herbane et al. 2004 ; Hofmann et al. 2013 ; McKnight and Linnenluecke 2016 ) through integration between different entities. Theoretically, the research builds on Cater and Rogers’s ( 2008 ) framework on sustainability, which includes resource dependence theory emphasising economic performance through non-economic factors. Enhanced sustainability mitigates the effects of disruption in SCM (Sajjad et al. 2015 ; Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ). It includes disruption for production and supply sides and is accomplished by improving the deliverables with engaged stakeholders, including customers. Demand visibility and clarity on customer preferences through effective collaboration, information sharing and seamless integration with various stakeholders enhance economic performance with the inclusion of environmental and social factors of the supply chain (Thron et al. 2006 ; Hofmann et al. 2013 ; Gouda and Saranga 2018 ), and are essential for emerging economies that are a part of global supply chains. The manuscript identifies enablers in SSCM for business continuity in global supply chains with an emerging economy perspective.

The paper is divided into six sections. A review of the literature for customer engagement and SSCM is in the “Literature review” section. The “Research methodology” section defines the research methodology, followed by the “Data analysis and results” section and the “Discussions and implications” section with discussions and implications. The “Conclusion and limitations of research” section is the conclusions with limitations of research.

Literature review

For the study to outline customer engagement enablers in SSCM for business continuity, a systematic literature review process was undertaken by adopting from the work of Carter and Rogers ( 2008 ), Fischl et al. ( 2014 ), Seuring and Muller ( 2008a ), Vivek et al. ( 2014 ) and Zhang et al. ( 2020 ). Research articles and studies from various databases like Web of Science, Science-direct, EBSCO, SCOPUS, ProQuest, Emerald and Google were explored, and final research articles were selected based on the following criteria.

As sustainability started gaining more prominence, the post-Brundtland Commission report (WCED 1987 ) on the importance of sustainability and Elkington’s ( 1999 ) definition of triple bottom line involving people, profit and the planet. The time horizon for the research work is from 1990 to 2021.

Identification of relevant research articles was made using the keywords like “Sustainable Supply Chain Management”, “Strategic Sourcing”, “Customer Engagement in Sustainable Supply Chain Management”, “Supplier relationship management”, “Business continuity and sustainability”, “Business Continuity and Sustainability”, “Sustainable business practices”, “Disruption management in the supply chain” and “Business continuity and stakeholder theory in SSCM”.

For further inclusion and exclusion of research studies, Carter and Rogers ( 2008 ), Seuring and Muller ( 2008a ), Vivek et al. ( 2014 ), Shashi et al. ( 2019 ) and Zhang et al. ( 2020 ) were referred. The selection process of articles was performed in multiple folds. First, we included articles written in English language and published in peer-reviewed journals. Likewise, we exclude the obfuscated literature such as magazine, conference proceedings, doctoral thesis, white papers, workshop summary, poster presentations and news blogs to increase the reliability of the study. After screening process, 130 peer-reviewed articles from more than 40 journals considered for the review process. In the SLR process, a sorting process was performed in which title and abstract reviews were analysed to select research papers that suggest clear management focus pertaining to customer engagement in supply chain, business continuity and sustainable business. To avoid any human biasness and vagueness in article selection, we thoroughly read the full article before leading to final decision. Hence, rigorous search process was performed, resulting in a final set of 72 research articles to be considered for the study.

This research also references studies made by Mc-Kinsey and the company for more relevance to current business practices in the pandemic.

Subsequent sections summarise the literature review followed with research gaps for outlining the enablers of customer engagement for sustainable supply chain management in disruptions like COVID-19.

Engagement for business continuity

The literature in SSCM earlier focused on environmental practices, including green SCM and procurement practices involving recycling, waste reduction, developing environmentally safe products, environmental impact assessment of various partners, measurement and accounting of sustainability (Amann et al. 2014 ). Researchers considered SSCM social aspects too, with studies involving corporate social responsibility practices, fair labour and working conditions and etc. (Brammer and Walker 2011 ; Amann et al. 2014 ). However, now the three aspects of SSCM are taken as a whole. SSCM is a summation of economic, environmental and social factors (Carter and Rogers 2008 ; Seuring and Muller 2008a ) wherein sustainability choices of the organisation are extended to the supply chain. Thus, it involves the organisations and supply chain economic performance with the environmental and social factors. SSCM supports risk reduction and performance enhancement too (Brammer and Walker 2011 ) and affects corporate reputation on how an organisation responds to various environmental and social concerns to meet the expectations of its partners and customers (Hoejmose et al. 2014 ).

Carter and Rogers ( 2008 ) further elaborate that sustainability is critical for risk management in times of disruption, including climate change when fluctuation in resources demand and supply can cause uncertainty and proactive engagement can lower the risk in the supply chain. Organisations are interdependent on their stakeholders as per stakeholder theory, where key partners are engaged depending on the need and the equation prevalent between them (McKnight and Linnenluecke 2016 ). This engagement with suppliers and other stakeholders serves customers during various risks, including resource depletion and natural calamity (Zhang and Awasthi 2014 ; Bendul et al. 2017 ).

SSCM involves informed decisions through collaborations (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ) between a focal company, suppliers and partners to yield benefits and value to its customers at minimum supply cost (Papageorgiou 2009 ) and depends on the network’s design for real-time management through planning and scheduling. Business continuity management involves risk assessment, continuity planning and steps for recovery (Azadegan et al. 2020 ). The literature also identifies the integration of triple pillars of sustainability with cooperation (Seuring and Muller 2008a ), coordination (Carter and Rogers 2008 ) and collaboration (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ) for engagement with stakeholders, including internal and external to value add as per the requirement. Wankmüller and Reiner ( 2019 ) clarify that collaboration is the highest level of engagement between different entities in a supply chain built with cooperation and coordination between them. In times of disruption, collaboration supports the highest level of commitment and trust to create winning solutions, shared identity and combinations for those involved leading to customer satisfaction (Kaur and Bhardwaj 2019 ) for greater economic performance.

Furthermore, integration between different business systems and stakeholders supports the movement of information, material and capital, enhancing the organisations’ competitiveness and profitability (Ahi and Searcy 2013 ), and is a differentiator for greater brand recognition, resource optimisation, better customer service and competitiveness (Luthra et al. 2015 ). The engagement between different organisational customers, stakeholders and partners be for public, private, for-profit or not-for-profit organisations also gets increasingly complex with the increase in the number of partners and the size of entities (Roehrich et al. 2014 ). However, common goals, shared knowledge, leadership and governance mechanisms that focus on increased experimentation and innovation through collaboration help in managing the inter-organisational relationships. For the relationship between different entities of different sizes, the literature identifies that private or smaller organisations have the skill, knowledge and innovation capabilities. In contrast, larger or public organisations support social value creation, incentives for innovation, employment and competition to increase performance over time (Roehrich et al.  2014 ; 2019 ; 2020 ) while overcoming the barriers.

Engagement supports business continuity in disruption and risk management by planning strategy alignment up to the operational levels through information sharing, communication and adaptive organisational structures and processes (Herbane et al. 2004 ). Engagement is vital for efficient management of resources, planning for newer practices, disruption and climate change (Van Doorn et al. 2010 ; Zhang and Awasthi 2014 ). It also has external reasons for brand management and internal engaged partners and customers through shared identity (Vivek et al. 2014 ; Grewal et al. 2017 ; Dahlmann and Röhrich 2019 ). However, integration at the complete organisational level or SC level gets complex with multiple entities and partners (Roehrich et al. 2014 ; Azadegan et al. 2020 ) and thus affects business continuity. Schatter et al. ( 2019 ) further elaborate that fewer studies and approaches are in literature suggesting approaches for handling disruptions at the complete SCM level. Most business continuity studies are focused on IT industry or at the team level with fewer units.

The literature identifies different approaches for business continuity in SSCM and involves risk management and performance (Khalid and Seuring 2017 ; Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ), collaboration (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ) and design (Wu and Pagel 2011 ; Busse et al. 2016 ) for better economic performance. Economic performance in disruption is sustained operations with efficient delivery times while working with minimal resources (Simatupang and Sridharan 2002 ; Sik Jeong and Hong 2007 ). And engagement depends on different motivations and dynamic expectations (Shepetuk 1991 ; Chen and Paulraj 2004 ) reflected in managing SSCM during disruption.

Enablers of customer engagement in SSCM for business continuity during COVID-19

Risk management and performance in supply chain management (rmp).

Disruption is a tremendous risk, and its management in SCM involves long-term economic, environmental and social sustainability (Markely and Davis 2007 ). Azadegan et al. ( 2020 ) emphasise the importance of risk management in business continuity planning. As per their research work, risk management involves engaged relationships and communication with a broader network to identify, assess, monitor and respond.

Risk management and performance in SSCM have more information exchange between customers—internal and external, to effectively utilise resources, profits, economic gains and skill development (Hofmann et al. 2013 ; Roehrich et al. 2014 ). Thus, it involves clarity of communication with clear procedures and technology to manage resources, tasks and capabilities (Simatupang and Sridharan 2002 ). It is a part of a strategy where the directions flow from top management up to the tactical levels. Roehrich et al. ( 2014 ) elaborate that risk and performance management is one of the salient features of SSCM, and organisations that cannot comply with sound environmental and social practices in their SCM have effects on survival and organisational reputation. Supplier base, reputation (Azadegan et al. 2020 ), market positioning and cost pressures enhance the risk in SCM, and decision-making is affected by different priorities of various customers, their motivation, commitment and contextual setting to contain risk and performance.

Collaboration of stakeholders, supplier evaluation by understanding customer expectations (Alicke and Strigek 2020 ) and alignment are strategies for enhanced performance (Kazancoglu et al. 2018 ) and risk management. In disruption, organisations usually work by enhancing more suppliers, thus multiple sourcing instead of single sourcing (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ) support, and increased suppliers enhance complexity to respond to manage risk (Roehrich et al. 2014 ). However, prior supplier evaluation and development with predefined criteria cater to the changing needs to manage disruption effectively. It is true both for lean and green SCM (Collin et al. 2009 ; Khalid and Seuring 2017 ).

Engagement with customers (Alicke and Strigek 2020 ) is also a means for more trust (Wankmuller and Reiner 2019 ), emotion, brand connection, shared identity and experience. It needs long-term relationship management to create the contextual setting for agility which implies being flexible, informed and responsive (COVID-19 Supply Chain Resources and Strategies 2020 ). It affects satisfaction, perceived value, expectations for business existence and continuity (Sik Jeong and Hong 2007 ; Won Lee et al. 2007 ; Van Doorn et al. 2010 ; Ellinger et al. 2012 ). Business continuity literature also suggests that integration of various entities and partners in SC has been less effective at organisational level than at a team level. This affects an organisation’s ability to respond to various disruptions in SC (Azadegan et al. 2020 ).

Collaboration (COL)

Collaboration between suppliers and the entire supply chain is an effective strategy to enhance competitive advantage (Won Lee et al. 2007 ; Khalid and Seuring 2017 ; Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ) through improved customer understanding and intimacy. Disruption can be handled through enhanced and stored inventory but in the long term needs effective collaboration (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ), mitigating organisational inertia and involves strategic purchasing and information sharing with customers (both internal and external) to manage resources and forecast demand.

Wu and Pagel ( 2011 ) emphasise that sustainability is accomplished in the supply chain through the same processes used to enhance quality, reduce waste, improve effectiveness and etc. and get stakeholder satisfaction. In the short term, framing the decisions without direct advantages will lead to cost, but the collaborative approach focusing on each customer can accrue gain in the long term. Customer or supplier engagement also supports new product design and innovations (Dahlmann and Röhrich 2019 ; Gong et al. 2019 ). Decisions become the most crucial part as limited information leads to lesser attainment of the desired firm objectives. It becomes vital with global supply chains (Busse et al. 2016 ) while dealing with changes and uncertainties.

In SSCM, collaboration with strategic insights reduces ambiguity for action with many customers, suppliers and other stakeholders who have their objectives and thus lack a common goal. Maximising individual gains and profit alignment for different customers and suppliers in the entire SCM (Thron et al. 2006 ; Khalid and Seuring 2017 ) supports reducing lead time and reducing wastage through lesser inventory (Collin et al. 2009 ). It is an effective way for sustainability with more profits and local involvement of partners to manage relationships better, understand and respond to customers. Customer engagement supports through speed and agility to deliver products as per customer demand and preferences for SSCM. Minimising the impact of disruptions through collaboration is valid when the entire product life cycle is included, right from research and development to end product recycling and recovery, resulting in innovation (Treacy and Wiersema 1993 ; Butner 2010 ).

Design of supply chain management (DSC)

The design of SSCM considers standard procedures/technology for demand visibility to enhance resiliency for business continuity in times of disruption through agility, flexibility and collaboration (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ; Gong et al. 2019 ). Effective design of SSCM has various stakeholders for optimum utilisation of resources, inventory through a lesser focus on nodes. It involves the smoother flow of information and material as per customer needs and demand gauged through engagement to determine customer value thresholds for customer alignment as per the need. Engagement in SCM is defined in terms of basic, transactional and collaborative ones. Essential engagement pertains to the regular sharing of information followed by transactional information for specific outcomes. Collaborative engagement by design focuses on working with various customers to achieve common objectives (Dahlmann and Röhrich 2019 ) . In designing SSCM through effective communication, customer engagement strategies lead to greater transparency up to SCM’s sub-tier level. Furthermore, it supports to enhance resilience in times of disruption by more information exchange on-demand visibility to provide customer value (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ) with quality to target customers and segments with minimal friction (Treacy and Wiersema 1993 ; Ali et al. 2017 ; Gong et al. 2019 ). Jabbarzadeh et al. ( 2018 ) elaborate an optimum approach in SCM design which combines strategic, tactical and operational actions that need more focus from researchers.

Research gaps

Effective communication, decision-making and alignment of different customer motivations as per strategic imperatives support SSCM (Vivek et al. 2014 ). Strategic imperatives for SSCM are undertaken at the firm and the complete supply chain for new product developments, reengineering involving customer feedback (Alicke and Strigek 2020 ). Integration with effective governance mechanisms, structures and information sharing (Liu et al. 2012 ) supports business response and recovery of organisations from disruptions (Azadegan et al. 2020 ). However, various entities and partners in SC enhance the complexity and affect the ability of an organisation to respond to disruptions in an effective manner.

Kleindorfer and Saad ( 2009 ) further elaborate that the way an organisation responds to disruption falls majorly in two categories. One is to reduce the occurrence, and the other is to respond to the high-impact, low-frequency disruptions. However, the response is limited by the organisation’s ability and structure, and there is no one size all fit way. Trust, information sharing and economic performance for all will make the response effective. This can affect managerial ability for decision-making. When GDP, employment and corporate reputation get seriously hampered with disruption in emerging economies, outlining critical enablers is important for business continuity.

The literature suggests enablers of customer engagement for business continuity in a broader dimension include risk management and performance evaluation, collaboration and design using engagement through effective information sharing of strategic imperatives (Wu and Pagel 2011 ; Dahlmann and Röhrich 2019 ; Shashi et al. 2019 .; Song et al. 2020 ).

However, there is not much research evidence to identify and outline the customer engagement enablers from the three broader dimensions: risk management and performance evaluation, collaboration and design with a clear plan of action for managerial decision-making (Song et al. 2020 ; Tat-Dat Bui et al. 2020 ). In addition, SSCM focus on resource optimisation and agility can make SSCM vulnerable in times of disruption (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ). Effective decision-making in disruption needs clarity of enablers for organisational business continuity. However, tools for decision-making in uncertain situations are lacking (Schätter et al. 2019 ).

Moreover, the three broad dimensions have been used separately or combined with another at a broad level for business continuity. For instance, risk management and collaboration are explored (Beske and Seuring 2014 ) or the design of SSCM (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ). When constraints are high and resources are limited, identifying key customer engagement enablers to focus on can support managerial decision-making for business continuity, creating a winning scenario for all the entities of SCM. Customer engagement enhances business performance (Al-Dmour et al. 2019 ), and identification and prioritisation are vital.

To bridge the above gaps, twenty customer engagement factors under the three main dimensions of SSCM in times of disruption are identified with the help of extensive literature review and finalised by various deliberation with experts which are presented in Table 1 .

Research methodology

This study proposed a research framework to rank and prioritise customer engagement enablers in SSCM by determining the relative importance weight using rough SWARA (R-SWARA) as depicted in Figure 1 .

Representation of research flow

As discussed in the “Literature review” section, customer engagement enablers contribute to a resilient and sustainable supply chain. In this study, the enablers’ comprehensive know-how would facilitate decision-makers to make a robust decision by determining the relative importance of identified enablers of customer engagement in SSCM.

Rough stepwise weighted assessment ratio analysis (R-SWARA)

Zavadskas et al. ( 2018 ) first developed the R-SWARA method for determining the relative weights of the attributes by using rough numbers to reduce the subjectivity and uncertainty in complex decision-making problems. In recent times, R-SWARA has gained popularity among researchers and practitioners. It has been noticed lately that many studies address research problems by applying hybrid frameworks associated with MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making) and rough set numbers.

For instance, Zavadskas et al. ( 2018 ) used rough SWARA as a novel MCDM approach in the logistics sector under uncertainty. Vasiljević et al. ( 2018 ) employed to evaluate the criteria for supplier selection in the textile industry. Sremac et al. ( 2018 ) used the ranking of the third-party logistics provider. Stefanović et al. ( 2019 ) used rough SWARA to rank and prioritise the influential safety factors for developing occupational safety and health (OSH) climate. Ulutas et al. ( 2020 ) was used for the evaluation of selection criteria for logistics service providers. Contrary to other conventional MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making) techniques, R-SWARA is a facile and less tedious technique to capture experts’ knowledge and judgement rating to evaluate the criteria’s relative weights. This technique’s main advantage is that it requires fewer comparisons of criteria among themselves than other MCDM tools.

Additionally, this technique proved as a powerful technique to determine the significance ratio of identified criteria for making decisions. The R-SWARA method consists of the following steps, as mentioned by Zavadskas et al. ( 2018 ).

Step 1: Define a set of attributes or CSFs that participate or strive for the decision-making process.

Step 2: Establish a team of k experts who will rate or rank the attribute according to their relative importance, from the highly significant to the least significant attribute. Afterwards, S j is determined in such a way, starting with the second attribute or criterion, that we can determine how important criterion C 1 is compared to criterion C 1- n .

Step 3: In this step, every individual response of each expert ( K 1 , K 2 ……. K n ) is converted into a rough matrix ( C j ) using Eqs. ( 1 )-( 6 ) mentioned by Zavadskas et al. ( 2018 ).

Step 4: In this step, normalisation can be done of matrix RN  ( C j ) in order to determine the matrix RN  ( S j ) by using Eq. ( 8 ).

By using Eq. ( 9 ), we can determine the elements of matrix RN  ( S j ).

The first element of matrix RN  ( S j ), i.e. \( \left[{S}_j^L,{S}_j^U\right] \) = [1.00, 1.00], because j  = 1. For other elements j  > 1, Eq. ( 9 ) can be calculated using Eq. (4):

Step 5: In this step, calculate the matrix RN  ( K j ) by using Eqs. ( 5 )-( 6 ).

Step 6: In this step, re-calculated matric RN  ( Q j ) can be obtained by using Eqs. ( 7 )-( 8 ).

Step 7: Finally, relative importance weights matrix RN  ( W j ) are calculated by using Eq. ( 9 ).

Data collection

In this study, qualitative and quantitative approach is utilised for analysing the enablers of customer engagement for SSCM. The study involved an extensive literature review and opinions of SCM experts from academics and industry practitioners for identifying and finalising various enablers of customer engagement for SSCM in an emerging economy context.

Following identification of the enablers of customer engagement for SSCM, questionnaires were administrated for data collection from managers and senior management of Indian manufacturing companies in healthcare supply chain. During the course of our research, the executives of healthcare supply chain company “XYZ” expressed a keen interest in our findings. To complete the expert questionnaire, we purposefully selected 20 senior and middle level managers with extensive expertise. The companies have more than ten crores per annum and have multinational operations and hence global supply chains. Furthermore, the experts had minimum work experience of 10 years in decision-making in the supply chain. A team of 20 experts consisting of logistics and supply chain managers, customer relationship managers, senior-level managers, social sustainability strategy managers and directors are used for the study. According to Bai et al. ( 2019 ), forming a 10-expert decision-making committee for an individual case firm is adequate to deliver reliable outcomes. Furthermore, despite the fact that there is a large body of research on the SWARA techniques in the literature, many studies include fewer than 10 experts (Büyüközkan et al. 2015 ; Li and Perçin 2019 ; Wen et al. 2019 ). Therefore, it is reasonable to select 20 experts in this study. The experts’ information is depicted in Table 2 .

Data analysis and results

Identification and finalisation of enablers of customer engagement for sscm.

In this phase, extensive literature review and experts’ judgement were employed to identify and finalise key enablers of customer engagement for SSCM. In this study, a team of twenty experts were invited to validate the identified list of enablers of customer engagement and were asked to enrich the final list by adding or deleting the enablers with their domain experience. After that, the final list of twenty enablers of customer engagement for SSCM has been categorised into three main dimensions, namely, risk management and performance in supply chain management (RMP), collaboration (COL) and design of supply chain management (DSC). Finally, the main dimension and sub-dimension enablers of customer engagement for SSCM are tabulated in Table 1 .

Calculation of the weights of enablers using rough SWARA method

In this step, expert ratings were collected through interviews and questionnaire surveys administered with the help of the prescribed method given by Zolfani et al. ( 2018 ). In this study, all twenty experts were asked to determine the most significant enabler compared to others. The expert rating score for each main dimension enabler is presented in Table 3 . Similarly, the ratings for all sub-dimension enablers of customer engagement for SSCM are tabulated in the Appendix Tables 9 , 10 , and 11 .

Based on the expert evaluation, eleven out of twenty experts identified risk management and performance in supply chain management (RMP), followed by eight out of twenty experts identified collaboration (COL) and only one expert identified design of supply chain management (DSC) stand the most crucial main dimension enablers of customer engagement for SSCM. The design of supply chain management (DSC) enablers were recognised as least important by thirteen experts, while collaboration (COL) was marked once as the least important enabler of customer engagement in the main dimension category. In the next step, converting all the individual ratings into rough group matrix RN  ( C j ) is based on the above rating by using Eq. ( 1 ) and presented in Table 4 .

Afterwards, the value of normalised rough group matrix RN  ( S j ) is obtained by employing Eqs. ( 2 ) and ( 3 ). In this step, the least enablers of customer engagement have the maximum value as per the value derived from the rough group matrix, and the most significant enabler is equal to one, while other enablers of the same RN  ( C j ) matrix divided them by the maximum value, i.e. RN  ( C DSC ) = [2.297, 2.885] in this case.

In this step, all the enablers of customer engagement of the normalised rough group matrix RN  ( S j ) should be added by one except the value of RN  ( S COL ) by applying Eq. ( 6 ). The obtained matrix RN  ( K j ) is presented in Table 5 .

Next, all the values of matrix RN  ( K j ) are recalculated by applying Eq. ( 8 ) in order to determine the value of matrix  RN  ( Q j ).

Finally, the relative importance weight and ranking of main enablers are obtained using Eq. ( 9 ), as shown in Table 6 .

The calculation of matrix RN  ( W j ) is presented below.

Similarly, all the twenty experts were requested to rate the most significant and least significant among the sub-enabler category. Individual responses for all the sub-enablers by all the twenty experts are used to determine the weight of all the enablers of customer engagement in SSCM and presented in the Appendix Tables 9 , 10 , and 11 .

Finally, the global weight or global ranking of all the main and sub-dimension categories of enablers of customer engagement for SSCM was calculated using all the experts’ ratings to apply the above calculations in Table 7 .

Discussions and implications

The research outcome is summarised with a global ranking of enablers in Table 6 and sub-enablers in Table 7 to support managerial insights for effective decision-making in SCM disruption. As per Table 6 , the main enablers of collaboration are having the highest weight, followed by risk management and performance, with the last being the design of supply chain management (COL > RMP > DSC). This is also in affirmation with the earlier studies of Thron et al. ( 2006 ), Dahlmann and Röhrich ( 2019 ) and Sánchez-Flores et al. ( 2020 ), where researchers concluded that engagement for collaboration is vital for disruption management. Collaborative engagement by the decision-makers in an organisation with all the stakeholders, internal and external customers, supports effective decisions to manage uncertainty. Through engagement and by gauging the customer’s demand as reactive or passive, the focal organisation aligns its resources to add value through its respective product and services. Thus, the entire supply chain’s economic impact is managed to focus on the environmental aspect through social sustainability.

Furthermore, as per Table 7 , the sub-enablers for the main dimensions of collaboration, risk management and performance and design in supply chain management are ranked. The top five sub-enablers as per global ranking obtained by speed and agility to deliver products as per customer demand and preferences (COL1), followed by an emphasis on information sharing for effective collaborative planning including managing resources demand forecasting and replenishment (COL3), focus on target customers and segments (RMP4), strategic purchasing (COL6) and top management support and communication (RMP1).

In disruption, business continuity needs making the best use of available resources. Resources are scarce and get scarcer in times of extreme changes/disruption, with the behaviour of hoarding and poaching too rampant. The conventional risk management strategies include a narrow focus on one supplier, building an adequate inventory and supplier pool, and support business continuity. A strategic response through engagement for resource management and business continuity gains significance in extreme cases when there is a complete halt in demand and supply side like the one witnessed during the pandemic of COVID-19. Moreover, this scenario of complete halt from both the supply and demand side is now not rare, with changes in the environment and climate more frequent and rampant.

As per this study, effective and strategic engagement to gain the speed and agility to deliver products as per customer demand and preferences is ranked the most crucial sub-enabler for business continuity disruption. The second critical enabler emphasises information sharing for effective collaborative planning including managing resources, demand forecasting and replenishment. This inference gains a perspective for the first sub-enabler as information sharing has to be adequate to gain agility when every step, especially in disruption, has cost attached in scarce resources and lost opportunities. Focus on target customers and segments (third critical enabler as per Table 7 ) can support vital information for effective organisational deliveries. For instance, as had been the case in healthcare in the pandemic of COVID-19, more than equipment for surgeries, the target segment like the hospitals needed protective equipment to safeguard against the infection (Abdelnour et al. 2020 ; Alicke and Strigek 2020 ). Focus on target customers supports business continuity as all resources; strategies are aligned with more agility for value addition, including strategic purchasing (fourth important sub-enabler as per Table 7 ). It needs top management commitment and focus (the fifth critical enabler as per Table 7 ).

The ranking of enablers for SSCM is interpreted as they may not be critical for business continuity in disruption but are crucial for managing engagement that supports SSCM (Sierra-García et al. 2015 ). “Demand and delivery management” (sub-enabler ranked 6th), “firm’s strategy for competitive advantage” (sub-enabler ranked 7th), “focus on quality” (sub-enabler ranked 9th), “maximisation of individual profits” (sub-enabler ranked 14th) and so on are enablers for enhancing engagement for SSCM. Customer’s needs and alignment of individual motives and profits with the overall firm strategy create a competitive advantage for long-term business continuity. Thus, focus on supplier evaluation with pre-defined criteria (enabler ranked 10 as per Table 7 ) for long-term collaboration will support disruption and achievement of other firm objectives. The last rank in all the sub-enablers is the contextual setting for agility (RMP8). The contextual setting for agility is the broader part that caters to stepping back and taking stock of the situation for aligning the initiatives. Speed and agility are essential while managing disruptions, and hence contextual setting may affect the needed momentum. In all, effective strategic focus on engagement in the long term can support business continuity through appropriate processes, technology and innovation in disruption and achieving long-term objectives.

The study’s outcome complements Carter and Rogers ( 2008 ) sustainability framework and stakeholder theory (Hofmann et al. 2013 ) and is consistent with research studies (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ) for SSCM in times of disruption. It focuses on the social aspects of engagement with stakeholders using focused usage of available resources to gain economic sustainability. It will ensure business continuity through effective managerial decision-making in emerging economies as a part of the global supply chain by focusing on agility with information per customer requirements.

Finally, this study, utilising rough SWARA and collaboration (COL), is positioned as the most significant among all the main enabler category. In this manner, the relative importance weight of collaboration enablers is altered with the incremental addition of 0.1 from run 1 to 9 (Kumar and Dixit 2019 ; Kaushik et al. 2020 ; Kumar et al. 2020 ). Accordingly, the changes have to be made for other main enablers simultaneously. The relative importance weights of all other main dimension enablers using sensitivity investigation are presented in Table 8 . It can be therefore deduced that the empirically derived framework in this study is quite robust in nature as the experts’ judgement was not affected by variations in the weights of different criteria.

Implications of research

Management of disruption for business continuity is essential. Disruption management at different points of time in SCM entails responsiveness, practices for the outcomes leading to enhanced performance and integration. SCM focuses on the flow of information, resources and services and seeks stakeholder engagement for improved efficiency and performance (Ahil and Searcy 2013 ). Resources are scarcer in disruption and uncertainty makes decision-making difficult due to the complexity of situations along with time pressures to respond. Thus, focused value addition for greater output from the availabilities per customers’ need enhances the performance and efficiency of SCM for business continuity through strategic focus to and with customers.

Disruptions, including pandemics like COVID-19 and climate change for SSCM, need organisational agility and effective, timely decision-making with customers and stakeholders. Sustainability in SCM involves three key aspects, including the performance activities and the value provided with SCM components (Ahil and Searcy 2013 ), focusing on the relationship with internal components for external customers. Customer engagement is presided by awareness through information flow to effectively manage resources in regular times and extremities like the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research worked on the gaps for clear criteria to decision-makers for response in disruption. It ranked customer engagement enablers in their importance through literature review and expert opinion in the broad dimension of risk management and performance, collaboration and design using research methodology through R-SWARA. Customer engagement thrives on strategic focus and information sharing through effective collaboration to support business continuity across nations’ boundaries when nothing is certain and global supply chains can falter any moment due to vivid scenarios. The research and its ranking of enablers of customer engagement support managerial decision-making by identifying the enablers for business continuity. Speed and agility to deliver products as per customer demand and preferences, followed by emphasising information sharing for effective collaborative planning, including managing resources, demand forecasting and replenishment, will create value addition in SCM to continue the business in complex and uncertain scenarios including in different time spans, industries and economies as supply chains are integrated.

Implications to theory

In disruption for business continuity in SC, trust, information sharing and economic performance make the response effective (Kleindorfer and Saad 2009 ) with different customers (internal and external). However, the increase in the number of entities and thus the complexities affect the response and engagement. It is easier to maintain it at the team level than at the organisational level in SC (Azadegan et al. 2020 ). The literature identifies three broad dimensions used separately or combined with another for business continuity. For instance, risk management and collaboration are explored (Beske and Seuring 2014 ) or the design of SSCM (Jabbarzadeh et al. 2018 ). When constraints are high and resources are limited, identifying key customer engagement enablers to focus on can support managerial decision-making for business continuity, creating a winning scenario for all the entities of SCM.

The research builds on the earlier approaches to sustainability through the framework of Carter and Rogers ( 2008 ) for economic performance through non-economic aspects, including environmental and social aspects with resource constraints. In addition, the research extends stakeholder theory (Hofmann et al. 2013 ) to SSCM in emerging economies where different stakeholders can influence an organisation’s response to different stimuli. There is a dearth of studies in emerging economies on SSCM involving resource management and ways to overcome the challenges in uncertainty (Sánchez-Flores et al. 2020 ). The study supports business continuity with emerging economy aspect through ranking customer engagement enablers. Enhanced sustainability through customer engagement mitigates disruption in SCM for both the production and supply sides. A collaborative model of engagement with various customers and other measures, including enhanced production capacity, is accomplished by several suppliers with limited resources, including logistical and workforce. Demand visibility and customer preferences through effective collaboration with various stakeholders bring clarity for more extraordinary value addition. This research outlines the critical customer engagement enablers, and focusing on them can effectively manage extreme disruption.

Implications to practice

The enablers outlined in this study to manage disruption in SSCM will support managerial decision-making in extremities of disruption like COVID-19 and climate change scenarios. The engagement enablers ranked in the survey give a direction to decision-makers/managers to focus on critical enablers for business continuity implementation in emerging economies. It also indicates enablers whose performance can be delayed in the disruption. Engagement with internal and external customers supports manufacturers or producers in more resilient ways in extremities and disruptions when decision-making gets complex due to pressures in time and performance with limited resources.

The study is also significant for managing climate change disruptions by providing strategic impetus through ranked enablers to the management to focus on customer engagement to build long-term resilience in the supply chain. Agility and flexibility through a collaborative approach can be built-in SCM through information sharing, focusing on target customers involving forecasting demand, innovation, refilling, ordering products and inventory. Sustainable use of resources is not just a need but is a crucial component for business continuity in emerging markets to prepare for more contingencies, including the recession, pandemic and muted demand with focused value addition and appropriate usage of resources.

Unique contribution of the research

This study’s contribution is the ranking of enablers of customer engagement for SSCM to manage contingencies and disruption like COVID-19. Customer engagement enablers for SSCM had not been ranked earlier in any study to provide a framework of enablers to practitioners when deciding and implementing a response to manage a disruption through SCM. The practitioner’s response through the enablers identified in the study considers the limitation of resources and workforce, focusing on target customers through a collaborative approach. Collaborative engagement and approach will support moving the available resources fast as per clear demand identification. It has substantial implications for decision-makers and practitioners to support their efforts of business continuity. Resources are always limited, and SSCM will need to enhance resource utilisation while maintaining organisational, economic performance and supply chain. Collaborative engagement with local communities, suppliers, employees and customers will support long-term contingency planning in SSCM. Internal and external customers are the crucial components in S.C., and their involvement affects the organisational response to uncertainties through decisions and practices.

Conclusion and limitations of research

Management of disruptions like COVID-19 is vital for business continuity as organisations; individuals need to work with limited resources and agility to cater to fluctuating customer demands and preferences. There is a lack of research in emerging economies to evaluate resource consumption and strategies to respond to the crisis. Typically in emerging economies, apart from pandemics, climate changes like earthquakes and floods too can affect the organisational deliverables. Moreover, in disruption, every business model gets relooked for its deliverables and efficiency. It becomes essential in emerging economies from a business perspective, with 40% GDP coming from SME, who cannot survive without economic performance or financial support. They lack the financial prowess to survive long term and knowledge to draft a thoughtful organisational response. The entities in the entire supply chain are affected without a strategy for business continuity. Business continuity is also a strategy for brand reputation and competitive advantage in SSCM.

Resources are scarce, and disruption creates new behaviours across industries, including hoarding and demand stagnation, and it tilts the balance of the entire supply chain. Therefore, focusing on supplier nodes is risky, and diversification with customer engagement and focus is crucial for effective deliverables and SSCM. The research used an extensive literature review and expert recommendation to identify critical customer engagement factors necessary for SSCM. The enablers in broad dimensions of risk management and performance, collaboration and design in SSCM were further evaluated using rough SWARA. Furthermore, the different enablers were ranked to manage disruption and for business continuity in SSCM.

The first contribution of the research is identifying enablers from the broad dimensions where at times in literature it is risk management and performance, collaboration or design of SSCM. The theoretical contribution of the research is building on the sustainability framework by Cater and Rogers ( 2008 ), emphasising economic performance with non-economic factors, including social and resource utilisation.

As per the research, collaboration is a key enabler and a differentiating factor for businesses to tide over disruption. Stakeholders can support the agility to move as per customer demand and preferences for a faster communication, crucial information sharing, execution and bottlenecks to manage disruption for business continuity in the entire supply chain. It is the critical contribution of research to support decision-makers through customer engagement across the entire supply chain. It can provide a strategic way to respond to the crisis with collaboration for quick decisions. Agility is needed in times of uncertainty. Thus, focusing on target customers’ needs can more engagingly move the entire supply chain, thus supporting the efforts. Over the years, SCM has evolved from local to global supply chains and is now increasingly focused on local to eye the global. Customers, including the internal and external stakeholders, employees and investors, play a significant role in SCM. Thus, an effective engagement strategy can further support the efforts to create the case for economic, environment and social sustainability in the management of the supply chain. Resource utilisation through collaborative approaches will make the entire process more efficient and reduce waste while also bringing economic gains even to the weaker links in the supply chain, which could not have survived if they had worked alone. Moreover, emerging economies need to focus on supply chains for positive economic gains. Organisations need measures to enhance business continuity and operations while also taking care of their stakeholders, environment and profits. The research is also crucial for other emerging countries and organisations with supply chains across the world. Responding to uncertainties with a clear focus on target customer needs can support creating agility in the global supply chain.

The research is limited by its sample size and scope of industries. The research methodology was adopted in emerging economies as part of the global supply chain. It can be extended to other sectors, including agriculture and service industries, to validate the study’s outcome. Researchers can also extend the study for varied SCM disruptions with practical implementation and outline the challenges for more development in research from emerging economies and global perspectives. Furthermore, the expert opinion can be biassed concerning experience and their work. Different hypotheses for the enablers in other industries with different sample sizes and methodologies, including multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) like A.H.P. and A.N.P., can evaluate the enablers and effects to substantiate customer engagement for SSCM in times of disruption like COVID-19.

Data availability

All the data have been provided in the manuscript.

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Kaur, A., Kumar, A. & Luthra, S. Business continuity through customer engagement in sustainable supply chain management: outlining the enablers to manage disruption. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29 , 14999–15017 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16683-4

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Contributor Notes

This technical note and manual addresses the following main issues: 1. What is operational risk management and how this should be applied to treasury operations. 2. What is business continuity and disaster recovery planning and why it is important for treasury operations? 3. How to develop and implement a business continuity and disaster recovery plan using a six practical-step process and how to have it imbedded into the day-to-day operations of the treasury. 4. What is needed to activate and what are the key procedures when activating the disaster recovery plan.

Introduction

Management of financial risk is very important for the treasury operations of any ministry of finance. Ministry of finance bears responsibility for the management of very substantial government assets and liabilities, and for the management of many large value transactions, probably much more than any other government ministry or agency. The large sums involved mean that any risk exposure can have damaging financial consequences on the budget outturn and the overall government balance sheet. But there is potentially also severe reputational and political damage associated with operational errors or failures, reflecting on the competence of the ministry of finance covering treasury operations.

Ministry of finance is potentially exposed to—and will have a particular appetite for exposure to—a wide range of risks. Figure 1 illustrates the perceived risks:

financial risks : traditionally managed by a risk management unit located in the ministry of finance that includes market, liquidity, and credit risks

business risks : such as new legislation, change of government, macro-economic performance and any other factors affecting the ministry of finance’s environment—these are often managed as part of the budget planning process

operational risks : a range of threats from loss of key personnel, settlement failure, and compliance failure, to theft, systems failure and building damage—operational risk management aims to ensure the integrity and quality of the operations of ministry of finance and treasury using a variety of tools including audit, recruitment policies, system controls, and business continuity planning.

Perceived Treasury Risks

Citation: Technical Notes and Manuals 2011, 005; 10.5089/9781475504705.005.A001

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Awareness of operational risk is low in many countries, and very few ministries of finance have a business continuity and disaster recovery plan (BCP/DRP). Often it is perceived as something applicable only to the private sector and attracts little attention by senior management. This is because it is not seen as important or a priority, there are inadequate resources allocated to establish and maintain an operational risk management (ORM) framework including BCP/DRP, responsibility is delegated to information technology, and it becomes a one-off project rather than an integral part of the day-to-day treasury operations. Management neglect is often at fault with the belief that “it won’t happen to me”.

The problem of course is that ORM covers a wide umbrella, often seen as covering everything except for market, liquidity, and credit risks. Unlike market or credit risk, operational risk is mainly endogenous to the ministry of finance. Apart from external events such as natural catastrophes, it is linked to the business environment, nature and complexity of treasury operations, the processes and systems in place, and the quality of the management and of the information flows. There is normally no regulatory pressure to put in place adequate measures to monitor and control operational risks and maintain a BCP/DRP as is the case with central banks.

In this paper, references to the ministry of finance (MoF) should be taken to include treasury operations (managed by the treasurer), notwithstanding that some countries have a separate treasury department or agency. A debt management unit (DMU) may also be part of ministry of finance or separately constituted (e.g. as a debt management office, DMO). The DMU or DMO may perform some of the treasury operations such as cash management, although these will often be shared with or in coordination with ministry of finance.

Introduction to Operational Risk Management

Under Basel II developed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) 2 , operational risk is defined as “the risk of loss resulting from inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems or from external events.” The definition explicitly includes legal risk, but excludes strategic and reputation risk. While this definition and sound practices established by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and COSO, and usefully elaborated by entities such as TransConstellation, have been primarily designed for the banking and financial sector, the governing principles can appropriately be applied to treasury operations. 3 What is necessary is an ORM framework that is appropriate to the range and nature of treasury operations and the operating environment.

For treasury, the categories of risks, such as market risk (exchange rate and interest rate risk), liquidity risk, and credit risk are relatively well known; however operational risk is not. Government treasurers are now beginning to understand operational risk management and the importance to their treasury. A summary of operational risks faced by the treasury is set out in Box 1 . Business continuity planning should be an integral part of the ORM framework for treasury.

• What is ORM?

The treasurer should be aware of the major aspects of operational risks as a distinct risk category that should be managed, and should approve and periodically review the operational risk management framework applicable to treasury. The framework should provide a definition of operational risk and lay down the principles of how operational risks are to be identified, assessed, monitored, and controlled or mitigated. A risk committee may be in place to oversee this. process.

Typical Treasury Operational Risks

Infrastructure and technology failures covering computer systems, power, telecommunications, data and physical records

Incidents where access to premises is denied, either through inaccessibility or building damage

Dependencies on third party key service providers such as the central and/or commercial banks, telecom and internet providers, and other outsourced operations, or resource failures from such incidents as a pandemic.

Human errors or failures through lack of resources, skills, training, policies, procedures, delegations, code of conduct, and poor management

Failure to meet statutory, legal or contractual, human resources and other obligations including management objectives and reporting obligations

Natural and regional disasters covering incidents such as earthquake, tsunami, severe flooding, hurricane/typhoon, volcanic eruption, severe fires, landslides and civil disturbance or terrorism

Senior management in treasury should have responsibility for implementing the ORM framework. The framework should be consistently implemented throughout all treasury operations, and all levels of staff should understand their responsibilities with respect to ORM. Senior management should also have responsibility for developing policies, processes and procedures for managing operational risk across all treasury activities, processes and systems. Senior management should also ensure that before new activities, processes, and systems are introduced or undertaken, the operational risks inherent in them is subject to adequate assessment and managed appropriately.

Treasury should implement a process to regularly monitor incidents that may cause a business disruption and/or have a serious impact on treasury operations. There should be regular reporting of pertinent information to the treasurer and senior executives in the ministry of finance. Treasury should have policies, processes, and procedures to control and/or mitigate the potentially more serious operational risks. Treasury should periodically review the ORM framework and should adjust their risk limitation and control strategies in the context of the government’s overall risk management strategy and objectives. Treasury should have in place a business continuity and disaster recovery plan to ensure its ability to operate on an ongoing basis and limit losses in the event of any business disruption.

Once an ORM framework is firmly established, treasury should consider using internal and/or external auditors to independently examine and assess the framework. Ideally, the auditors should from time to time independently conduct, directly or indirectly, an evaluation of treasury policies, procedures and practices related to operational risks.

• Application of ORM to Treasury Operations

As noted in the introduction, operational risk is a wide umbrella, often seen as covering everything except for market, liquidity, and credit risks. Developing an ORM framework can be an evolutionary process as it will take time and effort to not only identify and understand the risks but also the mitigation techniques in an environment that is constantly changing. There is no need to try to do everything perfectly from the outset. The framework can be developed and applied incrementally as techniques improve and staffs in treasury increasingly get to understand the risks and mitigation techniques. For the framework to succeed, it is extremely important to develop a culture of risk awareness across treasury and ensure that all staff is involved in developing and implementing the framework.

The first stage involves senior management understanding and signaling to all staff the importance attached to ORM and the need for their participation and ongoing cooperation. The principles as outlined above that will be followed in the management of operational risk need to be made clear to all staff and embedded into day-to-day operations of treasury. Each line manager needs to be made responsible for ORM in their own business area.

It is advisable that a “risk champion” be appointed to take overall responsibility for ORM. The risk champion will lead and guide the process across treasury, coordinate reporting to the treasurer and senior management, and develop the appropriate ORM policies and procedures and control environment. Ideally, the risk champion would have relevant background or experience, although this will often not be possible. There are, however, opportunities for professional training in ORM and business continuity planning which could be considered.

Once the structure has been established, the development and maintenance of an ORM framework for treasury should follow a six-step process: 4

understand and document business activities

identify, assess and measure risks

develop risk management strategies

implement risk management policies, limits and controls

monitor performance and compliance with policies, limits and controls

process for continuous improvement of the ORM framework.

Examples of the ORM process from the Ministry of Finance in Turkey and Chile are set out in Figure 2 5 and Box 2 , respectively.

ORM Model for Turkey

For treasury operations, service providers such as the central bank and commercial banks should demonstrate that they have adequate controls and safeguards when they host or process data related to banking systems. Treasury should discuss with the central bank and the commercial banks this requirement and suggest that they could use the International Standard on Assurance Engagements (ISAE) No.3402, Assurance Reports on Controls at a Service Organization, as it is a widely recognized auditing standard developed by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB). 6 A service auditor’s examination performed in accordance with ISAE 3402 is widely recognized, because it represents that a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of its control objectives and control activities, which often include controls over information technology and related processes. ISAE 3402 is the authoritative guidance that would allow the central and commercial banks to disclose their control activities and processes to treasury in a uniform reporting format.

The management of operational risk must be a responsibility shared and understood by all staff in treasury operations. Staff should be aware of the operational risk exposures in their area, and how they might affect business continuity, and have responsibility for managing those exposures within their own control. Senior managers should be responsible for identifying and monitoring the risks in their own units and for ensuring that the control activities work as intended and in line with priorities set by the treasurer. International experience has shown that for this all to work, ORM is more effective if a “risk champion” is appointed who is located in a risk management unit along with other risk management functions.

The risk management unit including risk champion has two roles. First, it drives the development of the risk management process, monitors performance and execution, and reports to the treasurer. Second, it acts as advisers to senior managers in identifying risks and planning control activities. In practice, the unit typically evolves over time, from being the main driver when first establishing the ORM framework including BCP/DRP, to being more of a facilitator or adviser when it is running smoothly.

Case of Chile: Outline of the Risk Management Process

The main objective is “to have an efficient internal control system and to comply with a Risk Management process structured, consistent and coordinated for effective and efficient achievement of institutional goals and objectives”.

Risk Management has the following objectives:

Identify risks and opportunities

Analyze the risks in the process

Assessing risks

Set the risk treatment

Monitor and review (feedback)

Construction of the risk matrix

Step 1: Risk Policy

Define roles and responsibilities of the process of risk management

Determine the key processes involved in improving the quality of service

Be communicated, published and consistent with the Quality of Service Policy

Step 2: Survey Process

Raise the processes developed by the Quality of Service Policy

Identify risks by type

Step 3: Development of the Matrix

Classification of transverse processes

Process and sub-process weights

Justification of strategic weighting

Step 4: Establish Ranking

Ranking by the process set

Establish ranking by sub-process

Step 5: Establish Treatment Plan

Measures, timelines, responsibilities, potential impact (reduce, accept, avoid, sharing) and performance indicators, measurement period goal

Step 6: Monitoring and Review

Generating reports

Diagnosis and improvement proposals

Strategic Risk Matrix

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

• Introducing Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Planning

Business continuity management or planning is the development, implementation and maintenance of policies, frameworks and programs to assist treasury manage a business disruption, as well as build treasury resilience. Resilience comes from tackling the likelihood as well as the consequences of disruptive events. Therefore, it is important to have both effective ORM and business continuity planning frameworks in place. Business continuity planning assists in preventing, preparing for, responding to, managing, and recovering from the impacts of an incident or disruptive event.

Business continuity means maintaining the uninterrupted availability of all key business resources required to support essential treasury operations. Treasury’s business strategies and decisions are based on an assumption of the business continuing. An event that violates this assumption is a significant occurrence in the life of any treasury, impinging directly on its ability to fulfill its business objectives and the reputation of the treasury and the government. Among other things, business continuity planning is about putting in place measures that seek to prevent business interruption events from occurring in the first place. It also encompasses establishing appropriate responses should such an event occur.

Business continuity planning is therefore that part of ORM that establishes cost-effective measures should an event occur. As such, it deals with actual events—a risk event which has occurred—and the action required responding to the event. To this extent, it complements the overall ORM process which deals foremost with possibility of occurrence of risks events that may occur, and the analysis and pro-active management of such events. Treasury faces a variety of risks. These may be sourced externally, and therefore largely out of the immediate control of treasury, or internally. Internal risks arise both at the strategic (MoF-wide) level and at the operational (business process) level.

Business continuity planning should address the subset of operational risks where environmental factors or poor operational controls raise the potential for loss of or damage to treasury operations (including people, information, infrastructure, and premises). With the support of all staff, treasury should maintain a BCP/DRP that the government and external counterparties will view as sound practice, and which will play an important part in the overall approach to ORM. BCP/ DRP concentrates on improving resilience and ensuring mitigation techniques are put in place for those areas identified as having a combination of very-high/high probability and catastrophic/major. It is also advisable to cover incidents of lower probability that have a catastrophic/major impact. How these are defined is set out in the business impact analysis section below.

Treasury should select the most cost effective and suitable risk intervention approach for each activity using one or more of the following strategies:

prevention or avoidance , where the probability of an event occurring is reduced or eliminated by, for example, installing back-up power generators, using more than one telecom provider, training staff, and implementing fraud prevention policies and procedures

transference , where risks are passed to third parties by taking out insurance or outsourcing with BCP/DRP incorporated in service level agreements

containment , where the potential impact of an event occurring is limited in the early stages using controls or other techniques by implementing fraud detection policies and procedures, putting in place escalation procedures so that treasury management can respond immediately should an event begin to escalate, and having more than one person to perform a particular task or activity

acceptance and recovery , where an event or disruption might well occur but treasury operations can be resumed successfully using the disaster recovery plan that is regularly tested at the recovery location (alternate site)

While some strategies can be implemented at minimal cost, there will be a trade-off between the cost of prevention and/or recovery and the recovery period needed by the treasury. Therefore, a key element for treasury to consider is the cost-recovery time tradeoff as can be seen from Figure 3 . The cost-recovery time trade-off will not be linear as the cost to shorten the recovery time, particularly if it is necessary to recover critical activities, processes, and systems, within minutes will require significant investment in replication of systems, mirroring of data, redundancy of communication and infrastructure, and an alternate site that is quickly activated.

Trade-off between Cost and Recovery Time

The cost of establishing and maintaining an alternate site could be high, not only in terms of the initial investment in the facility and all the equipment needed but also in terms of maintaining each system and renewing the equipment when changes or updates are made at the primary site. Also, it is important to ensure that the alternate site is sufficiently far away from the primary site so that both are unlikely to be affected by the same incident or event. For example, it would be important to ensure that the alternate site is located on a different power grid and/or provider as well as a different telephone exchange and/or provider so that both sites are not impacted simultaneously. Regularly using the alternate site for training and testing can provide some benefits to compensate for the cost.

The recovery of treasury’s most critical activities, processes and systems are likely to be hours or for some activities 1-2 days, although there could be end-of-day activities or processes that may need to be completed before day’s-end. In these cases, it may be more cost effective to prepare manual processes which can be activated if a disruption occurs. The cost-recovery trade-off should be considered as part of the business impact analysis and the mitigation strategies that treasury will implement.

• Importance of BCP/DRP to Treasury Operations

The relationship between operational risk, emergency response, incident and business continuity management or planning for a business disruption or event is shown in Figure 4 . These management activities are scalable, depending on the operating context of the treasury. It may be that in a small, non-complex or less time-critical treasury, some or all of these activities are combined. In a treasury that is large, complex, or geographically dispersed, the use of separate emergency response, incident management and business continuity management teams increases the need for clear roles and responsibilities, and effective communication. The focus of this TNM is business continuity management or planning.

Relationships in Managing a Business Disruption

Treasury’s policy for business continuity planning should be to:

perform a business impact analysis, and develop mitigation strategies, which will ensure the continuity of its business, operations and technology components in the event the existing environment is unavailable;

develop and maintain a comprehensive business continuity and disaster recovery plan (BCP/DRP) to ensure that essential/critical treasury activities are recoverable;

business continuity planning and the BCP/DRP should be developed in accordance with international standards such as the Business Continuity Management standard BS-25999 or International Standards Organization ISO-27031; and

report the status of business continuity planning and the BCP/DRP annually to the treasurer and senior management in the ministry of finance.

The BCP/DRP for treasury should be an integral part of the ORM framework and developed to ensure that the following objectives are met:

government’s interests are protected in terms of reputation, reporting and resource impact, and impact on treasury operations;

government meets all statutory, contractual and market obligations;

should an essential/critical activity be disrupted by an incident or event, this activity is re-established within the designated recovery period using the DRP; and

BCP/DRP is an integral part of treasury’s day-to-day operations and that it is regularly updated with ongoing staff training and testing.

• Six-Step Process to Develop a BCP/DRP

To develop the BCP/DRP, a six-step process is recommended as follows (each step is described in more detail in the next section):

Step 1 : Document business activities and critical processes and systems

Step 2 : Undertake business impact analysis to assess probability and impact

Step 3 : Develop BCP/DRP (include third parties)

Step 4 : Implement or update BCP/DRP

Step 5 : Training to imbed into the day-to-day operations of the treasury

Step 6 : Regular (annual) testing and updating

Developing a BCP/DRP

• Step 1: Document Business Activities

The first step is for treasury to fully understand the activities, processes and systems and identify the key risks that might impact on their operations. Process maps and process-flow analysis can be used along with existing procedure manuals to understand treasury operations. The risk champion suggested above can oversee this process to ensure a common understanding and consistency of approach and terminology. This should be at a level that will balance the amount of detail and usefulness to senior management and the overall process.

The key is to identify critical processes and systems and the time period when these processes and systems are required. This will determine the criticality of each activity, process and system in terms of the time period (minutes, hours or days) that treasury is unable to maintain essential/critical operations. A table of essential/critical systems should be developed and maintained by treasury (an example is provided as Table 1 below). It will set out the time period when each system is required, the data that will be recovered from the back-up, and the location where the system can be accessed should an incident occur.

Treasury Critical Systems Framework

• Step 2: Business Impact Analysis

A business impact analysis will involve everyone responsible for treasury operations, including the more junior staff, as it helps to develop a risk understanding and a risk culture within treasury. This can be done by convening workshops and brainstorming sessions for each treasury function. For each category of operational risk and incident that may affect treasury as set out in Table 2 , treasury should assess the risk exposures as a result of an incident or event affecting their operations. This requires separately assessing the probability and the impact, for example using a combination of Very-High / High / Medium / Low / Very Low Probability and Catastrophic / Major / Moderate / Minor / Insignificant Impact from a reputation, reporting and resource, or impact on treasury operations perspective as explained in Table 3 .

Incidents that May Affect Treasury Operations

Mexico Impact Criteria Framework

Not all operational risks will be of equal importance for treasury as this will be specific to the environment and risks faced. For treasury, there are three impacts that may need to be considered with the analysis:

Reputation al impact: that may lead to a loss of confidence by the government, loss of market confidence, media coverage, and/or a high-level ministerial or Parliamentary enquiry

Reporting and resource impact : that may be reported to the government or senior management within government-or external to regulators-and/or significant time is spent dealing with the issue

Impact on treasury operations : that may result in failure to meet treasury’s payment and other obligations and maintain the treasury activities for the effective functioning of the government

Under each of the three impacts, treasury should undertake an assessment of what are the factors that will impact according to each of the five assessment categories. An example of how this can look is shown in Table 3 . Clearly, this table will vary according to the activities that are the responsibility of treasury and the priorities that are assigned or implicit in treasury operations.

For each business activity, process and system used in the business impact analysis, treasury will then associate a probability to the occurrence of an incident/event and also an impact rating assuming that the incident/event were to occur. Those activities assessed by treasury with a rank of 4 and 5 are identified in the event of an incident according to Table 4 . Depending on its risk tolerance level, treasury may wish to also include the rank of 3, particularly where the impact could be catastrophic either in terms of reputation, reporting and resource, or impact on treasury operations.

Risk/Impact Matrix

The final key element of the business impact analysis is the time criticality of each system and process across treasury operations. This requires assessing the maximum period that treasury can be without access to the system or process before it materially impacts on its operations under any of the categories above. It is normal to categorize each system or process using time periods such as by end-of-day, within 24 hours (it could be less if needed), 48 hours, 72 hours, 5 business days, or more than 5 business days. Table 1 can be used for this purpose.

A detailed mitigation strategy then needs to be developed for those incidents or events that are ranked as 4 and 5 in Table 4 . If the number of incidents or events with these rankings is high, the matrix will clearly signal that there is a need for an alternate site and a well documented disaster recovery plan. The BCP/DRP will then set out critical information such as (1) critical systems and processes; (2) contact lists for key staff/teams; (3) standard procedures when invoking the plans; and (4) details of the recovery infrastructure including teams and documentation to be stored in the treasury office (primary site) and recovery location (alternate site).

• Step 3: Develop Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan

Once the business impact analysis has been completed, treasury should develop strategies that concentrate on improving resilience and ensuring mitigation techniques are put in place for those incidents or events ranked as 4 and 5 in Table 4 . For these areas, treasury should select the most cost effective and suitable risk treatment using one or more of the responses set out above. A business continuity planning report is then submitted to senior management on the greatest risks, the techniques to mitigate, control, or limit the risks, the actions that are recommended to address the greatest exposures including activation of a DRP, and an estimate of costs. Senior management can then assess the cost-risk trade-off before making decisions and seeking approval from the treasurer and/ or senior management in the ministry of finance.

An integral part of business continuity planning will be a Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) which documents the recovery component of the BCP. It facilitates the (i) smooth transition to recovery operations following a major incident or event (or disaster); (ii) escalation of recovery operations in the event of a prolonged disruption; and (iii) return to normal operations as quickly as possible. An important part of the DRP is the structure of incident management and recovery teams along with the administration and IT support. An example of a command center structure is provided as Figure 5 .

DRP Command Center Structure

• Step 4: Implement the BCP/DRP

Once the BCP/DRP has been approved, the risk champion or risk management unit can oversee the implementation of the BCP/DRP and incorporate it into the wider ORM monitoring and control policies and procedures for treasury. This will include raising awareness with external parties to cover all activities external to treasury of the BCP/DRP and ORM framework in order that they understand their respective roles in maintaining business continuity and during the activation when required of the DRP. The risk champion or risk management unit will be responsible for maintaining and ensuring compliance with the requirements set out in the BCP/DRP.

Treasury should also introduce the requirement that third party providers have in place a BCP/DRP and this should be included in service level agreements or a memorandum of understanding. These third parties would include the central bank, providers of telecommunication and banking services, and relevant external IT providers. It would also be useful for treasury to integrate its BCP/DRP with other critical systems such as the government’s integrated financial management information system (IFMIS), debt recording and management system, and other key systems in ministry of finance.

• Step 5: Training

Staff in treasury needs to understand its roles and responsibilities in compliance with the BCP/DRP and wider ORM policies and procedures. They may also need to take on additional responsibilities to introduce and maintain risk-reduction or mitigation strategies for their respective area. The BCP/DRP should include a section on training with training exercise/scenarios and the frequency of such training.

Training should be managed by the risk champion or risk management unit and undertaken for all treasury staff members and should consist of:

awareness presentations for existing employees (may also possibly be incorporated into a treasury orientation/induction program for new employees)

provision of a training manual

interactive training (Intranet)

If treasury has an alternate site, this can provide a valuable training facility as regular testing at the alternate site can be integrated with the training program. For example, it will enable staff in treasury to become familiar with the alternate site and how treasury operations can be run should an incident or event occur that may lead to relocation. While it is normal to rely on experienced staff that are deemed critical to treasury operations, this process can broaden knowledge and experience in order to reduce key person risk. Moreover, critical staff may not be available when an incident or event occurs and other staff can be called upon to provide the necessary backup in this situation. Some organizations have staff permanently at the alternate site with staff that can be rotated. This both ensures familiarity, and facilitates a quick start-up. It also allows continuity in the event that the primary site is completely destroyed.

• Step 6: Regular Testing and Updating

No matter how well designed and thought-out the BCP/DRP may seem, international experience shows that it will very rarely work in practice without realistic and robust testing. The critical systems and processes of treasury should be tested annually and the BCP/ DRP updated based on the results of each test and the need for continual improvement. It is important each system and process be individually tested. Testing can be disruptive as it requires commitment of staff to ensure sufficient resources are available. It is not recommended the BCP/DRP be tested as a whole as this would be resource intensive and may affect normal operations–unless it is at the weekend. A test exercise using a scenario approach is one option (this can involve a walk-through test or activation of DRP and testing at the alternate site) but a ‘live’ test is viewed as the only way to fully test the DRP. The testing could be done in conjunction with the testing of the other systems such as IFMIS and the central bank’s own DRP. An example of the maintenance and testing of the BCP/DRP is shown in Table 5 .

DRP Timeframe for Maintenance and Testing

Maintaining the BCP/DRP requires an ongoing monitoring process to assess its effectiveness and whether it is in accordance with the wider ORM policies and procedures. This is achieved through a combination of ongoing monitoring activities and periodic testing including the annual testing of the DRP. Ongoing monitoring occurs in the normal course of treasury operations; and it is the responsibility in the first instance of line managers, with coordinating responsibility assigned to risk champion or risk management unit. As was noted earlier, the BCP/DRP can be improved over time as experience develops, particularly when there is a history of incidents or events and their impact in terms of reputation, reporting and resource, or impact on treasury operations. The six-step process set out above should be revisited on an annual basis, although the first step may just involve an update of the business activities, processes and systems reflecting changes from the previous assessment.

All new business activities should be reported to the risk champion or risk management unit during the planning phase. As for changes to existing procedures and systems, these will also be reported to the risk champion or risk management unit. Business cases should include an evaluation of business continuity risks, and project budgets must include adequate provision for appropriate preventative and recovery countermeasures. No critical systems or new business activities should be put into production until suitable recovery arrangements have been implemented and tested.

Activating the Disaster Recovery Plan

• Command Center Structure

Should an incident or event occur that impacts on essential/critical treasury activities and/or necessitate relocation from the primary site, an incident management process will be established in a command center to manage the relocation and/or recovery. Figure 5 sets out the individuals and teams and interrelationships between those responsible for managing a recovery following an incident or event. This is to ensure that when an incident or event occurs, a well-defined incident management structure is in place to ensure:

the efficient flow of information

consistent decision making

effective communication of decisions

In the event of an incident or event, staff that has been pre-nominated and are available will relocate to the alternate site to recommence business. This simplifies the logistics of planning the recovery, reduces confusion amongst staff, and allows telephone diversion plans to be prepared and lodged with the telecom providers in advance. A degree of flexibility will be needed to cater for different incidents. However, the number of recovery locations used should be kept to a minimum to facilitate staff communication and emergency management.

Should an incident or event occur that requires building evacuation or denies access to the building, the emergency command center will need to be established in the alternate site (if this is in place) or some designated location. Some incidents or events may not affect all business units or the entire building. In this case, it may be practical to relocate affected staff to meeting rooms or other vacant space with the assistance of business systems and support vendors. Increasingly, the ability to work from home has become a viable and effective option in some incidents. For example, with the H1N1 pandemic, staff in the Treasury in Mexico that were confined to their homes but well enough to work were set up to work from home. This is more feasible with web-enabled systems, good internet services, encryption, and firewalls that are put in place beforehand.

The primary role of the command center is for the coordination, control and exchange of information across treasury. The command center team initiates the decision-making process for problems and major incidents that may or may not require business relocation. Crisis management and decisions of an immediate nature are also part of the responsibility of the team. This will include managing communications with external parties, such as the media and major external groups.

Members of the command center and associated groups include:

ministry of finance senior management and the treasurer

representative(s) from business systems/IT

representatives from support services such as HR, administration and/or building services

The responsibilities of all command center members will be to meet at the emergency command center location (alternate site if available or another designated location) in order to:

provide a central point of contact for all matters relating to the recovery operation for staff, suppliers, and media

facilitate the collection and collation of information relating to the status of the emergency and progress of the recovery

facilitate the distribution of instructions to staff, counterparties, and other affected third parties

The responsibilities of the command center team include:

quickly making the decision to invoke recovery activities based on available information

coordinating communications with ministry of finance

manage communications with the media either directly or through a media liaison person

maintain the flow of information to staff, counterparties and other key stakeholders

approve significant expenditure associated with the recovery

monitor compliance requirements throughout the recovery process

ensure that effective security is maintained in the locations where recovery activities are being undertaken

determine how the scope of recovery activities will be escalated in the case of significant incidents

plan and manage the restoration and recommissioning of the treasury primary site

Business systems should address the recovery of essential/critical IT infrastructure processes and systems. Some will involve the input of third parties to initiate call diversion and assist in re-routing other communications facilities. Treasury should ensure that service level agreements with key third party information providers reflect recovery requirements and include the provision for participation in testing exercises.

Case of UK DMO–Business Recovery Management

In addition to the Incident Management Plan, further procedures are necessary to ensure the individual business operations are recovered in an effective and timely manner. Guidance on the steps to follow is covered under Business Recovery Management.

Business Recovery Management is used in conjunction with the Impact Analysis component of the BCP. Whereas the Impact Analysis will provide a status report of how an incident may affect certain critical functions, Business Recovery Management looks at how the business operations are recovered following the incident.

The Impact Analysis provides actions and workarounds for specific critical processes. Business Recovery Management is used to assess and determine approaches to restoring key business operations.

Business Recovery Steps

Step 1: Business Assessment (Managers and/or Team Leaders)

Establish the current status of each business activity

Confirm IT system and resource availability for each business activity

Assess market conditions following any widespread incident

Establish status of key stakeholders

Step 2: Status Report (Managers and/or Team Leaders)

Provide status reports to senior management for each business area including:

High priority activities to be completed

Activities that will be suspended

Systems that are currently unavailable

Resource requirements and availability

Feedback from stakeholders

Step 3: Prioritization

Management responsible for each business area to determine the order of priorities for their respective areas

Senior Managers to confirm priorities of key business operations and communicate to Managers and Team Leaders

IT to be made aware of system requirements based on business priorities

Step 4: Decision-making

Any strategic decisions referred to appropriate forums.

Decisions on whether to suspend or cancel any specific operations

Decisions should be documented and reported to relevant business areas

Step 5: Implementation

Individual teams to implement agreed business activities using any manual workarounds as identified in the Impact Analysis

Staff to report progress and completion of activities to management so that subsequent assessments and prioritizations can be made

Any statements to stakeholders made in respect of any revised or suspended activities

Step 6: Returning to Main Office Location

Once the building manager has given clearance for reoccupation of main office location and the systems & telecommunications infrastructure have been restored, the remigration will require:

Validation that the infrastructure has been restored through testing by business areas, coordinated by Team Leaders

A detailed plan of migration to be prepared by the IT management team including synchronizing and testing the cutting back of systems and re-setting the disaster recovery site–the detail of this will depend on the nature and impact of the original incident

Senior Management Group should meet and agree a communication strategy involving an announcement to the market and advising key contacts of the remigration

Business systems role will also include managing the:

restoration of the e-mail, internet and other essential communication services

restoration or rerouting of electronic payment or banking systems with central bank and any commercial banks

retrieval of back-up data and restoration of data to resume critical functions at the recovery location

procurement, configuration and deployment of additional user workstations, peripheral equipment, network and cabling capacity, phone lines and handsets

procurement, configuration and deployment of additional server equipment and telephony services to support the escalation of recovery activities when recommissioning of the treasury primary site is likely to take more than, say, two weeks

third party liaison to provide user support

technology project management of the restoration and recommissioning of the treasury primary site

cut-over to normal operations and decommissioning of temporary services

Support services (HR, administration and building services staff) will be expected to report to the command center team and provide assistance as directed. This may include:

tracking staff whereabouts and ensuring staff safety and welfare

answering the phones and relaying messages

contacting staff to relay messages and confirm availability

arranging catering, accommodation, trauma counseling, emergency payments, organisation of child care, staff rotation etc

ensuring security is enforced at the incident and any temporary recovery location

facilitation of insurance claims and emergency purchasing

redirection of mail and couriers

• Emergency Response

Following an incident or event, emergency response will comprise the following phases:

Evacuation and Containment : includes the actions by emergency response personnel to contain the incident, assure the safety of staff, prevent further damage or loss and ensure the treasury primary site is secure

Damage Assessment : members of the command center team (including business systems and support services) evaluate the magnitude of the incident or event and decide upon a course of action and/or recovery

Recovery Decision : based on the damage assessment, a decision is made regarding how and where to recover essential/critical business functions. If the incident or event can be isolated and contained, actions are taken to restore treasury operations using standard operating policies and procedures. It is important that all staff are made aware of their role during a recovery operation and that recovery information is clearly and regularly delivered to staff. This will be for staff to either return home until they hear otherwise or relocate to the alternate site

The objective for the emergency response is to minimize the risk to treasury’s business activities and operations in the primary site. This is achieved by reducing or if necessary halting activities until the recovery infrastructure is established with the primary objective of re-establishing critical activities within 24 hours (or if needed by the end-of-day) and other essential activities within 48-72 hours.

Each staff member should be issued with an information sheet and important contact details (treasury, ministry of finance and central bank), including existing mobile and home telephone numbers, external contact details, and treasury key contacts. This information can be made available in a format that can be stored on treasury staff mobile phones, iPads, laptops or other media for ease of access and recovery of this information.

• Business Recovery

Once a course of recovery action has been decided upon, business recovery will follow in this order:

Activate Recovery Infrastructure : the BCP for systems and communications infrastructure needs to be invoked with inbound calls being diverted and key production systems reverting to the alternate site. For all essential/critical applications, data will be accessed at the alternate site from restored systems or through a data center if applicable. For services provided by third parties such as the central bank, staff may be able to relocate to third party premises to work from designated systems.

Survival Level Operations : initially the business activities at treasury or the alternate site should be limited to core activities. For less time-critical functions, these can be temporarily suspended and/or staff directed to work from home.

Escalation : if the incident is severe enough to warrant an extended period away from the primary site (generally exceeding two weeks), business activity may be escalated since a prolonged period at survival level operations could exacerbate the impact of the incident, affect the ability of treasury to maintain essential/critical activities, processes, and systems, and cause undue stress for staff. Where practical, escalation priorities can be predetermined with indicative timeframes noted for the recovery of each business activity or process.

Primary Site Recommissioning : this includes actions taken to salvage, restore or replace damaged or lost property, facilities and services at the primary site and the process of recommencing business at the primary site.

• Post Incident Review

A comprehensive review can then be carried out to ensure that the recovery plan and infrastructure are updated or improved based on the experience of the incident. In particular, each of the six-step processes can be examined to identify weaknesses and/or omissions and the results used to revise and update the BCP/DRP. This may lead to changes to business processes, underlying infrastructure including systems and facilities at the alternate site, enhanced training, and testing among other changes identified in this phase.

Putting in place an ORM framework including a BCP/DRP should be seen as a priority for any treasury given the operational risks that they face and critical functions and activities that they perform. The development of a BCP/DRP should not be seen as a one-off project but should become an integral part of the day-to-day operations of treasury. The six-step process to develop, implement, test and maintain the BCP/DRP will provide the treasury with the practical steps needed to ensure that this occurs.

Australian National Audit Office ( 2009 ), Business Continuity Management: Building Resilience in Public Sector Entities, Best Practice Guide–June 2009 [ http://www.anao.gov.au/~/media/Uploads/documents/business_continuity_management_.pdf ]

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Bank for International Settlements ( 2003 ), Sound Practices for the Management and Supervision of Operational Risk , Basel Committee on Banking Supervision [ http://www.bis.org/bcbs/ index.htm ]

British Standards Institution ( 2006 ), Business Continuity Management: Code of Practice [ http://www.bsigroup.com/en/Assessment-and-certification-services/management-systems/Standards-and-Schemes/BS-25999/ ]

Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) of the Treadway Commission ( 2008 ), Internal Control–Integrated Framework: Guidance on Monitoring Internal Control Systems , Volumes I , II and III [ http://www.coso.org ]

Hakan Tokaç and Mike Williams ( 2011 forthcoming ), Government Debt Management and Operational Risk: A Risk Management Framework, and how it was applied in Turkey , OECD/EU

International Organization for Standardization ( 2011 ), ISO-27031: Information Technology–Security Techniques–Guidelines for Information and Communication Technology Readiness for Business Continuity [ http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail?csnumber=44374 ]

TransConstellation ( 2007 ), Best Practices in Qualitative Operational Risk Management: The ORM Reference Guide [ http://www.transconstellation.com ]

TransConstellation ( 2007 ), Roadmap to Operational Risk Management Success: The ORM Maturity Benchmark [ http://www.transconstellation.com ]

World Bank ( 2010 ), Guidance for Operational Risk Management in Government Debt Management , Tomas Magnusson, Abha Prasad and Ian Storkey [ http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTDEBTDEPT/RelatedPapers/22491571/OperationalRiskManagement201003.pdf ]

Annex: BCP/DRP Checklists 7

The following provides a set of checklists and templates that can be used to develop the BCP/DRP.

Checklist 1: Implementation of BCP

Checklist 2: Identify Critical Business Processes and Systems

Template: Requirements Necessary to Perform Each Critical Process or System

Checklist 3: Undertaking a Busines Impact Analysis

Checklist 4: Examining Options to Minimize Disruptions

Checklist 5: Alternate Site Considerations

Template: Table of Contents for BCP/DRP

Note: Ian Storkey is an international consultant specializing in government debt and cash management and is on the Fiscal Affairs Department roster of experts. This note has benefitted from comments from Mario Pessoa (FAD), Israel Fainboim (FAD), Mike Williams (consultant) and the Mexican Federal Treasury. The author would also like to acknowledge the information obtained or provided by the governments in Australia, Chile, Turkey and United Kingdom.

Basel II “International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards: A Revised Framework”, published by the Bank for International Settlements in June 2004.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has members from 28 countries that provide a BIS forum for regular cooperation on banking supervisory matters. The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) is a joint initiative of five private sector organizations and is dedicated to the development of frameworks and guidance on enterprise risk management, internal control and fraud deterrence. TransConstellation is a Belgian not-for-profit entity in the field of financial-transaction processing with members that include Banksys, Euroclear, Fin-Force, SWIFT and The Bank of New York (Brussels office).

For more information on each of the steps, refer to “Guidance for Operational Risk Management in Government Debt Management” published by the World Bank in March 2010 .

Refer Hakan Tokaç and Mike Williams (2011 forthcoming ).

On June 15, 2011, ISAE No.3402 replaced the Statement on Auditing Standards (SAS) No.70, Service Organizations that had been developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA).

The checklists have been drawn from Australian National Audit Office (2009) and modified to cover treasury operations.

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Table of Contents

• Front Matter
• Operational Risk Management and Business Continuity Planning for Modern State Treasuries
• Annex: BCP/DRP Checklists7
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Continuity & Resilience Review

ISSN : 2516-7502

Article publication date: 24 August 2022

Issue publication date: 3 October 2022

The purpose of this study is to address the problem of a plethora of potential plans related to business continuity and disaster recovery.

Design/methodology/approach

A review of the relevant academic articles, standards and guidelines related to business continuity and disaster recovery was conducted, and the discussed plans include critical information infrastructure plans, disaster recovery plans, information system contingency plans, business continuity plans and continuity of operations plans.

The content of each plan is explained. A layered business continuity and disaster recovery model is proposed, which consolidates all plans in a coherent manner.

Originality/value

Relationships, similarities and differences among each pair of plans are discussed, and the longitudinal validity and applicability of plans are presented.

• Critical information infrastructure protection plan
• Disaster recovery plan
• Information system contingency plan
• Business continuity plan
• Continuity of operations plan

Stamenkov, G. (2022), "Layered business continuity and disaster recovery model", Continuity & Resilience Review , Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 267-279. https://doi.org/10.1108/CRR-05-2022-0008

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Emergency preparedness: What is the future?

Jocelyn j. herstein.

1 Department of Environmental, Agricultural, and Occupational Health, College of Public Health, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Nebraska

Michelle M. Schwedhelm

2 Nebraska Medicine, Omaha, Nebraska

Angela Vasa

Paul d. biddinger.

3 Department of Emergency Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

Angela L. Hewlett

4 Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Nebraska

Emergency preparedness programs have evolved over the last several decades as communities have responded to natural, intentional, and accidental disasters. This evolution has resulted in a comprehensive all-hazards approach centered around 4 fundamental phases spanning the entire disaster life cycle: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Increasing frequency of outbreaks and epidemics of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases in the last decade has emphasized the significance of healthcare emergency preparedness programs, but the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has tested healthcare facilities’ emergency plans and exposed vulnerabilities in healthcare emergency preparedness on a scale unexperienced in recent history. We review the 4 phases of emergency management and explore the lessons to be learned from recent events in enhancing health systems capabilities and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological threats or events, whether it be a pandemic or a single case of an unknown infectious disease. A recurring cycle of assessing, planning, training, exercising, and revising is vital to maintaining healthcare system preparedness, even in absence of an immediate, high probability threat. Healthcare epidemiologists and infection preventionists must play a pivotal role in incorporating lessons learned from the pandemic into emergency preparedness programs and building more robust preparedness plans.

Emergency preparedness programs have evolved over the last several decades as communities have responded to natural, intentional, and accidental disasters. This evolution has resulted in a comprehensive all-hazards approach centered around 4 fundamental phases spanning the entire disaster life cycle: mitigating the likelihood or reducing severity of hazards, preparing plans to improve capability and capacity to manage an emergency before it occurs, responding safely and effectively, and recovering from the event. 1 These 4 phases, which represent a fluid and recurring cycle, are operationalized in the United States through the National Incident Management System framework, which must be adopted into organizational emergency management programs of hospitals and healthcare systems. 2 This approach depends on improving coordination and cooperation among diverse entities involved in addressing and responding to all probable hazards, including biological threats such as a case of a high-consequence infectious disease (HCID), a bioterrorism event, or a global pandemic.

Following US terror attacks in the early 2000s, healthcare systems began to be viewed as a national security priority. 3 , 4 Healthcare facility readiness to respond to community needs during a disaster has direct implications on the severity of the incident: mortality and morbidity associated with the event are also dependent on a facility’s preparedness and capabilities to effectively respond to and provide appropriate care for those affected. Beyond the health systems’ effective response, societal business continuity planning can inform prioritized strategies to minimize impacts to the economy, critical infrastructure, and resource acquisition.

Emergency preparedness in healthcare is inherently collaborative and requires a multidisciplinary approach, engaging a wide range of stakeholders in all phases of the disaster life cycle, including but not limited to, governmental agencies at all levels (local, state, and national), hospitals and other healthcare institutions, private businesses, and individual citizens. Within healthcare institutions, hospital epidemiologists, infection preventionists, and emergency managers are poised to play a pivotal role in infectious disease emergency management using their expertise in infectious diseases, infection prevention and control, and epidemiology; indeed, the critical nature of these roles was underscored during the COVID-19 pandemic. As retrospective analyses are completed and strategies from pandemic lessons learned are implemented, responsibilities of these professionals will continue to evolve and expand. Their unique qualifications and expertise position them as leaders in hospital pandemic planning 5 and liaisons with external public health, community coalitions, and emergency management collaborators.

The increasing frequency of outbreaks and epidemics of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases in the last decade has emphasized the significance of healthcare emergency preparedness programs, but the COVID-19 pandemic has tested healthcare facilities’ emergency plans and exposed vulnerabilities in healthcare emergency preparedness on a scale unexperienced in recent history. 6 In addition, the clearly disparate impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable populations and communities has drawn attention to the need to better mitigate, plan for, and respond to health inequalities in healthcare emergency preparedness programs. We review the 4 phases of emergency management and explore the lessons to be learned from recent events in enhancing health systems capabilities and capacities to mitigate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from biological threats or events, whether it be a pandemic or a single case of an unknown infectious disease.

Mitigation activities prevent or reduce the likelihood of a disaster occurring or the impact and severity of the event. The first step to implementing the 4 phases of emergency management is an assessment of a facility’s vulnerabilities to potential hazards and threats and the direct and indirect effects the hazards may have on the hospital’s ability to provide patient services. The hazard vulnerability analysis (HVA) 7 in healthcare enables cross-comparison of dissimilar hazards (eg, earthquake, terrorist attack, industrial accident, and outbreak), helps prioritize issues for emergency preparedness programs to address, and allows planning to be tailored to identified hazards with the greatest probability of affecting facility operations. 8 With a regulatory requirement to be reviewed annually, a hospital’s HVA serves as a benchmark to measure changes and improvements in preparedness levels. 9 Related to biological threats and events, countless mitigation activities can be implemented well in advance; the priorities identified through the HVA should guide facility-specific mitigation activities. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Hierarchy of Controls is also a helpful tool with which to prioritize and frame risk mitigation activities (Fig.  1 ); 10 indeed, many of the COVID-19 mitigation guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were framed around the Hierarchy of Controls.

Hierarchy of controls. Adapted from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Hierarchy of Controls. Available at https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/hierarchy/default.html . Not. PPE, personal protective equipment.

A core mitigation strategy for hospitals includes development of business continuity plans for maintaining operations during an emergency event, with an underlying premise to plan for the worst-case scenario. For an infectious disease emergency, this includes absence of an adequate workforce and resource and supply limitations. A business continuity plan must include identification of critical functions and staff, nonessential activities that can be suspended, and alternative strategies for resource allocation and supply chain access. These plans should also address impact to critical infrastructure, such as redundancy of power, communications, and data management systems. Although biological threats may not directly affect these elements, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for healthcare systems to enhance facility infrastructure to provide additional negative pressure rooms for isolation and technology infrastructure to enable remote work capabilities and a comprehensive telemedicine platform.

Certain disasters may be completely unanticipated, for which disaster-specific mitigation measures are either absent or of low priority (eg, hurricane mitigation in an area where hurricanes have historically been nonexistent). A global pandemic of a novel respiratory virus, however, has long been predicted, with only the precise timing and location of its emergence uncertain. 11 Likewise, outbreaks and encounters with new HCIDs are increasingly occurring 12 and numerous health systems across the US have experienced the presentation of a suspected case of Ebola virus disease (EVD), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), or other HCID in their emergency department in recent years. Despite this inevitably, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted gaps in health system mitigation for pandemic events and the unequal impacts of these events on different communities and populations. Even amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, now is the time for hospitals to assess, refine, and implement mitigation measures for future pandemic threats and to redouble their efforts to identify especially vulnerable populations, anticipate their needs, and improve their abilities to respond to those needs.

Preparedness

Hospital preparedness strategies improve organizational capability and capacity to respond to an emergency and are critical to local and national response to biological threats. Preparedness includes planning, training, and exercising for events that cannot be mitigated. Recent HCID outbreaks and the COVID-19 pandemic have underscored the need for hospitals to have well-developed and exercised standard operating procedures (SOPs), a trained workforce, communication plans, understanding of anticipatable needs of their vulnerable populations, clearly defined surge plans, and robust plans for supply chain management and staffing in the event of a biological threat.

Healthcare facility preparedness should be defined by an emergency operations plan (EOP) that drives facility operations during an emergency. For biological events, the EOP should include considerations ranging from how to safely manage singular cases of suspected HCIDs that may present at a healthcare system to pandemic planning policies for large-scale events. Tools and protocols for the former include early screening and identification of suspect cases, designation of appropriate isolation areas in all frontline clinical spaces, and development of SOPs for internal workflows and informing appropriate external stakeholders. This framework, referred to as “identify, isolate, and inform,” was developed by the CDC for EVD but is adaptable to any HCID in any frontline clinical setting. 13 , 14 Inadequate or delayed implementation of this framework has previously resulted in nosocomial transmission of HCIDs in hospital settings, as well as increased community spread of illness. 15 , 16

Emergency management plans for presentation of suspected HCID patients should include the following: provisions for active screening at the initial clinical points of contact; indications for mobilization of appropriate resources, including personal protective equipment (PPE); immediate isolation of patient in an area identified well in advance; minimization of hospital operation disruptions; timely notification of internal and external stakeholders; well-trained staff; just-in-time training plans; and plans to ensure the patient receives medical evaluation and immediate care while conducting the appropriate diagnostic testing in parallel. 8 A planning team that consists of physicians, infection preventionists, nurses, hospital epidemiologists, emergency coordinators, laboratory leadership, and facilities personnel should drive the development and refinement of these processes. Due to the high-risk setting that is HCID care, clinical decision making on invasive medical procedures to be offered should be considered well in advance and incorporated into hospital preparedness plans. 17

In contrast to these sporadic suspected cases of a HCID, epidemic and pandemic planning require substantial efforts in anticipation of prolonged increased volumes of patients, the need to be able to expand isolation capabilities in care sites, and the potential for utilizing alternative care sites, as well as adaptability in scaling up and adjusting plans to changing resource access and rapidly evolving recommendations. These plans require careful considerations to maximizing available spaces, healthcare personnel, supplies and devices, and other resources in surge events. Epidemic planning is necessary for local outbreaks that require multiple simultaneous hospitalizations, and pandemic planning is built on the assumption that the incident is not geographically contained and that regional and federal capabilities and assets that would support other mass casualty events may not be readily available.

In 2017, the CDC published an accompanying checklist to the National Pandemic Preparedness Plan that included hospital-specific actions to guide pandemic planning. 18 , 19 Although guidance and recommendations informed by previous outbreaks and disasters have been issued for healthcare surge capacity planning and resource allocation for pandemic events, specific recommendations for adequately addressing multiple waves of a continuing pandemic were generally lacking 20 and must be incorporated into future hospital emergency preparedness plans and policies.

Supply chain management

Over the past 2 decades, hospitals have generally evolved to function with a “just-in-time” approach to the supply chain, where few supplies are warehoused on site, but instead are delivered regularly as they are used. The vulnerabilities in that approach had national and international implications during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to shortages of medical supplies and devices and deviation from accepted standards for respiratory protection and use of other PPE. National surveys of US nurses during the early months of 2020 found that <30% of employers had sufficient PPE to respond to a surge of patients 21 and 87% reported having to reuse a single-use disposable respirator or mask with a patient infected with SARS-CoV-2. 22 The Strategic National Stockpile stores supplies that can be administered nationwide within 12 hours; however, the supply is intended to supplement local resources and was not sufficient to address national needs seen during COVID-19 response. 23 , 24

Healthcare systems must create supply caches, regularly review stockpile levels, and rotate supplies to ensure they are ready for use. For far-reaching events that exhaust national supply stocks, healthcare systems should include supply chain management plans in their EOP for rationing, allocating, and when necessary and appropriate reusing PPE and other supplies during a shortage. Coordination with local stakeholders, including public health, healthcare coalitions, and emergency management agencies, can help facilitate quicker access to available resources. Although the COVID-19 pandemic exposed significant gaps in all levels of supply chain management, future emergencies could affect supply chain issues that were virtually untouched during this pandemic, including waste services and gas or other fuel supply. It is important that as facilities retool their emergency plans for resource management, these elements are not overlooked.

Facility management

A surge situation may warrant evaluation of facility management and changes in existing spaces and workflows, to include an inventory of isolation capabilities available for surge. Facility management may also include the establishment of alternate care sites in nontraditional settings within or outside of the facility. Screening and separation of patients suspected of having an infectious disease until they are confirmed or ruled out is a core management strategy to protect facility personnel and other patients. The significance of virtual platforms that can facilitate triage, including telemedicine and virtual screening applications, have emerged in the COVID-19 pandemic as key elements in routing suspected cases to designated entry points and directly to isolation areas rather than presenting in frontline clinical areas, reducing the risk of nosocomial pathogen transmission. Healthcare epidemiologists and infection preventionists are primed to lead these efforts in coordination with facility managers.

Staffing and training

A pandemic planning assumption is that ˜40% of the workforce may be absent during a pandemic response. 18 Staffing models will evolve during different phases of surge capacity situations, and emergency management plans should be flexible and account for changing situations. Staff providing direct patient care and management may be pared down to only the most essential to minimize staff exposure risks, with personnel being cross trained to perform other services outside of their typical responsibilities (eg, nurses performing environmental cleaning and disinfection). As the situation evolves (eg, patient volume increases, elective procedures are cancelled, high workforce absenteeism), personnel may be relocated to other wards and take on other duties. Staffing strategies used during the COVID-19 response include training nurses to a higher level of care, administrators returning to the bedside as nurse extenders, and team nursing. 25 – 27

Alternative staffing models will inevitably warrant additional support for those redeployed, including training on standard operating procedures (SOPs), PPE, and other infection prevention and control elements. Likewise, adequate preparedness for presentation of a patient with an unknown infectious disease requires early identification and rapid implementation of infection prevention and control measures. To adequately prepare health systems for biological events across the spectrum of potential incidences (from a singular HCID suspected case to a pandemic), there is a need for ongoing assessment to ensure proficient infection prevention principles for all healthcare staff well before an emergency occurs. This not only protects the healthcare provider but can minimize transmission between patients and other staff.

Testing and evaluating plans

Too often in emergency management, plans are developed, agreed upon, written into policy, and then stored on shelves until a regulatory requirement or emergency motivate their use. Instead, plans should be living documents, with regular exercising, revising, and updating to align with evolving practices and operations. Drills and exercises should be conducted with both internal and external partners and offer hospitals opportunities to test their plans based off realistic scenarios, including presentation of a HCID case in the emergency department, a surge situation stemming from a pandemic, or a natural or manmade disaster.

Low- to no-notice exercises 28 are an especially effective way of evaluating preparedness plans and response capabilities as they are most reflective of real-life events. After-action reports and improvement plans, which identify strengths and gaps identified through the exercise and trackable corrective actions to address gaps, are vital to improving hospital preparedness; however, more importantly, plans should be developed to reevaluate updated protocols at regular intervals to ensure revisions were successful in a continuous cycle of improvement.

Response activities are aimed at reducing mortality and morbidity of a disaster, limiting overall socioeconomic costs, and maintaining essential hospital services. A facility’s EOP should guide their response to an infectious disease emergency, leveraging lessons learned from the preparedness phase to optimize response activation and effectiveness. 9 Frequent communication and coordination with external stakeholders, particularly other local hospitals and public health agencies, is critical to ensure rapid dissemination of information and unified responses, particularly in events with novel pathogens where recommendations frequently evolve as more is known about the causative agent. The establishment of a medical emergency operations center, or a similar structure, can facilitate cross-healthcare coalition collaboration and enhance coordination of the use of healthcare capacity across a city or region when resources are becoming overloaded. 29 Equally important is utilization of an internal platform to quickly push out updated guidance, recommendations, SOPs, training materials, and other information to staff during a biological event. Hospital intranet sites provide a “one-stop shop” for the most recent and relevant information during a disaster response.

A fundamental component of health system response to an emergency includes mobilization of the Hospital Incident Command System (HICS), which is outlined in a hospital’s EOP. As a scalable system built on an all-hazards approach to manage operations, information flow, and logistics in a systematic manner, HICS can be tailored to specific events. The HICS outlines key positions and responsibilities during an emergency event, including command staff (a medical-technical specialist, a safety officer, a liaison officer, a public information officer) and general staff divided into sections for operations, planning, logistics, and finance. 8 , 30 Hospital epidemiologists or an infectious diseases physician may be tapped during a biological event to serve as the medical-technical specialist to provide subject matter expertise to command staff and media. Infection preventionists are likely to serve as the safety officer to provide overall safety-related expertise to command staff and beyond. Medical leaders and/or capacity specialists are needed to ensure appropriate balancing and continual monitoring of capacity mobilization efforts with the need to provide essential medical care for the community.

The HICS system is well-suited for coordinating communication and resources during emergency events; however, the extensive and lengthy activation of HICS during the COVID-19 pandemic identified other needs to augment limitations of HICS. For example, the pandemic resulted in the need for incorporation of long-term changes to clinical practices that land outside the scope of the HICS. 31 Parallel yet integrated processes for addressing hospital response needs not adequately consolidated in HICS should be considered in emergency management plans.

The recovery phase, which may begin amid the response phase, includes restoration efforts and resumption of normal, or ‘new normal’ operations and includes considerations for facility recovery, staff recovery, and financial recovery. 9 Even though diverse stakeholders are generally unified during the response phase on a singular goal, recovery is complex and can be prolonged. During and following a major event, hospitals should compile data and lessons learned into an after-action report and improvement plan that outlines corrective actions and revisions to emergency management programs. 32 A priority in the recovery phase for healthcare systems is the well-being of personnel, which has been reinforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Anxiety, fear, and pressure stemming from high-risk situations, even among highly trained and experienced clinical teams, should be anticipated, as should the potential for negative reactions from community members and even family and friends. Psychological and specialist support should be easily accessible and highly encouraged as staff respond to and recover from emergencies.

Other facilities

One of the most significant learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly be the need for robust emergency preparedness program implementation in all healthcare settings, including long-term care facilities, skilled nursing facilities, outpatient clinics, urgent care centers, home health agencies, and other specialized centers such as surgical and dialysis centers. No healthcare setting was spared by the pandemic; indeed, some of these settings were epicenters of the most severe outbreaks of COVID-19 due to their vulnerable populations. Long-term care and skilled nursing facilities, in particular, were severely impacted, and constraints in the long-term care system availability negatively affected acute care hospital throughput and capacity. 33 The vulnerability of these settings was well known: long-term care facility residents have historically reported increased severe outcomes (eg, hospitalizations, death) following disasters, 34 , 35 and routine seasonal outbreaks of influenza in these settings are a significant challenge. 36 There is an obligation among healthcare, public health, and emergency management communities to improve emergency preparedness programs and training in these other essential healthcare settings to ensure the toll experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic is not repeated in future infectious disease emergencies.

In conclusion, a pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 was not unpredicted but was widely underestimated. The increasing frequency of HCID cases, emergence of new pathogens, and the COVID-19 pandemic emphasize the elevated and ongoing threat of biological hazards to healthcare systems. A recurring cycle of assessing, planning, training, exercising, and revising is vital to maintaining healthcare system preparedness, even in absence of an immediate, high-probability threat. These tasks have been historically challenging due to gaps in activities needed for robust preparedness and the resources and funding made available to do so. 37 Healthcare epidemiologists and infection preventionists must play a pivotal role in incorporating lessons learned from the pandemic into emergency preparedness programs and building more robust preparedness plans.

Facilities should waste no time in using local, regional and national lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to reevaluate and shore up known gaps, drive re-review and revision of existing mitigation strategies and epidemic and pandemic preparedness plans, and implement innovations emanating from the COVID-19 response. However, areas that went untested during the pandemic should not be overlooked, such as how to optimally and safely identify, isolate, and manage a suspected HCID patient presenting to an emergency department or clinic. Although the world’s focus has recently been centered on COVID-19, 2 independent outbreaks of EVD in sub-Saharan Africa, ongoing cases of MERS in the Middle East, and recent imported cases of monkeypox in travelers to the United Kingdom and the United States are a reminder for healthcare systems to remain vigilant and prepared for all biological threats.

Acknowledgments

Financial support.

No financial support was provided relevant to this article.

Conflicts of interest

P.D. Biddinger reports being Principal Investigator, Region 1 Regional Emerging Special Pathogens Treatment Center (funded by the US HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response) and Principal Investigator, Region 1 Regional Disaster Health Response System (funded by the US HHS Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response), outside the submitted work. P.D. Biddinger also reports being a board member of the American Red Cross of Massachusetts, outside the submitted work. All other authors report no conflicts of interest.