Business Resilience Planning
Businesses face risks in the economic, physical, political, technology and internal (staffing) environments. Some challenges are extreme and a continuity plan will help your business recover after an incident.
Undertaking a business resilience planning process will help you identify the strengths and weaknesses that exist in your business and ways that you can mitigate risks and maximise the potential of opportunities. This knowledge will help build resilience.
Throughout the resilience planning process, you can prepare for scenarios so that you know what to do when situations arise and you will have the resources and connections available to act. This will reduce stress and anxiety in times of challenge and allow you to think clearly and respond to situations rather than react.
In developing your resilience strategy, you should:
- Assess the potential risks for your business, the likelihood and consequences
- ways that you can manage the risks
- Identify your critical business functions, which your business depends on;
- resources required to perform critical business activities
- impacts (financial and operational) of not performing them
- Develop steps to recover critical business functions based on different risk scenarios
Note that prevention is the best way to protect against risks. Keep your work environment and equipment well-maintained, background check new staff, staff training up-to-date, back up your electronic data, keep electronic copies of important documents, and monitor and review your business performance regularly with consideration for emerging trends within the business and your market.
Why Should Businesses Benchmark?
To identify the strengths and opportunities for your business, you need to assess your performance against industry benchmarks. Knowing how you compare with competitors in various aspects of your business will enable you to make informed decisions and prioritise strategies and tasks. It will also help you to discover and focus on what makes you different from the competition in the always important eye of the customer.
One of the most important uses of benchmarking is to assess a business’s performance against direct competitors. This enables business owners to keep a competitive edge in a growing economy.
Annually benchmarking a business against the industry enables business owners to gain a clear accurate picture of how their business is performing. This enables companies to see their real performance levels and identify opportunities for improvement.
Business benchmarking should also be used to assess spending habits to ensure management is investing wisely. For example, if a business is spending much less than the industry standard on information technology, it may be worth investing in systems to increase productivity.
It is also important for businesses to review the pricing of products and services regularly. This ensures companies know how much they should charge for products and services based on the industry benchmarks.
Benchmarking annually can further support businesses to address any issues with customer service by assessing how much to spend on servicing and value-adding for customers. This process can increase customer satisfaction and ultimately lead to increased repeat business.
AAA Consulting has employed industry-leading benchmark comparison tools for your benefit. The benchmarking software used by our team of consultants will analyse and compare your business’s performance against hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of related Australian businesses. This information is used to generate a comprehensive benchmarking and business value report which will give you insight for:
Identification and implementation of relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to manage:
- Productivity indicators
- Business profitability
- Plant & equipment Return On Investment (ROI)
- Cash-flow planning
Depending on the level of support you choose, AAA Consulting can review this for you regularly. Partner with AAA Consulting today and discover where you need to focus to improve your share of the market and answer important questions regarding the profitability and efficiency of your business.