Geopolitical context, supply chain tensions, cyberattacks, climate events, pandemics… today’s businesses operate in an environment marked by structural instability and repeated crises, often simultaneous and interdependent.
In this context, business continuity can no longer be approached as a documentary exercise responding to regulatory or insurance requirements. It is becoming a strategic lever for resilience, operational performance, and value creation, serving to protect critical activities and stakeholder confidence by strengthening the company’s ability to absorb shocks and bounce back.
At KYU, we are convinced that business continuity is now essential and that it should not be simply the sum of local continuity plans, but rather a crisis management system deployed across the entire value chain of the company.
1. Why not start by mapping your value chain to gain visibility and responsiveness ?
Recent crises have highlighted an often underestimated reality: the strong interdependence of activities, systems, suppliers, resources, and countries. However, in many organizations, the mapping of value chains and interdependencies often remains fragmented, static, and insufficiently connected to operational issues.
Yet comprehensive value chain mapping makes it possible to :
- Identify critical activities and their key dependencies (IT, suppliers, sites, human resources) ;
- Understand potential domino effects between different nodes in the supply chain ;
- Anticipate breaking points and major vulnerabilities
Combined with watch tower-type event detection and anticipation systems (geopolitical, climatic, cyber, commodity tensions, etc.), this approach enhances crisis anticipation and management capabilities, providing a consolidated, real-time view of threats to operations.
Our advice: make mapping your value chain an operational tool, connected to event monitoring and crisis management, in order to increase your responsiveness to emerging risks.
2. What if BIA became a real tool for decision-making and investment arbitration ?
Business Impact Analysis (BIA) is often perceived as a complex, time-consuming, and difficult-to-understand methodological exercise. When used incorrectly, it is limited to a theoretical snapshot of impacts, without any operational translation or decision-making value.
However, this analytical approach is essential for directing continuity efforts where they create the most value and avoiding spreading resources too thinly across low-criticality scenarios, while improving the adequacy of insurance coverage for the risks incurred.
A mature BIA makes it possible to :
- Analyze the financial, operational, regulatory, and reputational impacts according to various risk scenarios ;
- Objectively prioritize critical activities to be protected as a priority ;
- Define continuity objectives aligned with the company’s strategy ;
- Justify the necessary investments (organizational, suppliers, infrastructure, IT) on the basis of a controlled cost/impact ratio ;
- Ensure that insurance programs are optimized and better negotiated by demonstrating your expertise to insurers.
By articulating strategic scenarios (macro-crises, systemic risks) and operational scenarios (unavailability of sites, suppliers, critical systems), the BIA becomes a common language between risk management and all stakeholders in the company.
Our advice: transform your BIA into a management tool capable of informing strategic decisions and demonstrating the value created by investments made to ensure business continuity.
3. What if your continuity strategies became a driver for continuous improvement ?
Defining continuity strategies should not be limited to producing static business continuity plans (BCPs). In an unstable environment, these strategies must be robust, agile, proven, and constantly adapted and improved.
Key levers for achieving this include :
- The formalization of realistic and operational fallback scenarios (degraded modes, production transfer, etc.) ;
- Securing key resources (safety stocks, raw materials, human resources, IT, energy, infrastructure, etc.) ;
- Dual sourcing and diversification of critical suppliers (multi-geographic zones, multi-process partnerships, etc.) ;
- Regularly conducting tests, crisis exercises, and feedback sessions.
The challenge is not only to “hold out” in the event of a crisis, but to make business continuity a real competitive advantage that allows companies to recover faster than their competitors. To achieve this, it must be part of a continuous improvement process, linked to operational performance, organizational transformation, and governance requirements (particularly in light of increased expectations from regulators and investors).
Our advice: keep your continuity strategies alive over time, so that they are always operational and focused on your key challenges, by integrating them into your organization’s decision-making cycles.
