Continuity assured at Marks & Spencer
Commitment to business continuity as management changes
This week’s high profile boardroom changes at Marks & Spencer have not affected the retailer’s commitment to its business continuity strategy.
While boardroom reshuffles make the task of business continuity (BC) more difficult, the man in charge of BC at M&S believes it is sufficiently embedded in the culture of the retailer to have been only minimally affected.
The issue of ensuring that there is sufficient boardroom attention paid to the need to have robust systems in place when the unexpected hits was one of the key themes of the Business Continuity Planning for Retailers(BCP4R) conference in London this week.
Trevor Patridge, head of business continuity at M&S, said: “We’re committed to BC even though we’ve lost most of the board. We just need to educate the new board as everything else is already working. All we need to do is let them know what they need to do.”
The task of embedding BC in the culture began for M&S in 1992, when it first created a strategy for keeping the business trading under all circumstances. The strategy has subsequently been tested a number of times, beginning with the destruction of its Manchester store in the 1996 city centre bombing. Although it took four years to replace the building, the BC plan that M&S had in place ensured the company was back trading after only 13 weeks, in temporary accommodation.
Other events such as terrorism and general threats are also planned for, but Partridge said: “BC is not really about terrorism, it’s more about [trading through] fires and floods.” He also explains that not only do physical events call for BC planning, but also actions such as selling a division – as M&S has recently done with its Money business- and buying an operation like Per Una. In each case, BC planning allows the business to keep trading despite the changes.
Partridge said the September 11 tragedy was a ‘trigger point’ for BC to be regarded as critically important within M&S, as with many other companies. It has since gone on to invest in a Crisis Management Centre that runs 24/7. The company now also performs continuous independent risk analysis and business impact analysis.
Despite such planning, Patridge believes no company is ever fully on top of things. For example, he told the conference he would have liked an involvement in the company’s decision to relocate its head office from Baker Street to Paddington Basin, to enable a risk analysis to be performed before the decision was taken, rather than once the move was agreed at board level.
He said: “When we are involved in such decision-making processes, then that’s ‘eureka’, because it shows that business continuity is then fully embedded throughout the business.”
BCP4R was a Retail Bulletin Conference organised by Retail Events.
