Business Continuity Planning has progressed significantly in the past ten years. The area that has not received adequate attention or preparation is the area of manufacturing operations. Ironically, this area is typically the source of the company's income and has received less attention than the business operations. There are numerous reasons for this phenomenon.

The #1 Reason....manufacturing is a difficult area for which to plan

The complexity, limited options and costs associated with most manufacturing lines have caused the planning professionals to focus on those areas that they could get their hands around. Even the process systems that have increasingly been used to run the highly automated environments have at best had their data backed up and protected. Some thought, but little planning, has been allocated to this most critical environment.

This gap in planning is the Achilles heel for many corporations. Fortunately, few major corporations have suffered catastrophic losses. General Motors and other automobile manufacturers have suffered major interruptions from work stoppage caused by strikes. The area of manufacturing operations and product distribution must be included in the planners' scope of planning and objectives. Most importantly, the planner should recognize that planning for manufacturing must include the suppliers of raw materials and components used to create the end product. Your suppliers disaster can become your company’s disaster.

There are unique areas and issues of manufacturing planning that make it a true challenge for the planner. Not all areas mentioned below are applicable to all companies. Also, the list is not all inclusive.

UNIQUENESS OF THE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT

The manufacturing environment is different in a number of major areas:

Custom Fixtures

In the business environment, most equipment is available either off the shelf or with a minor delay in acquisition. In contrast, many of the fixtures used to construct pieces of equipment, test equipment, or make products are custom made by the engineers of the company or an outside manufacturer. The fixture may be one of a kind and may take weeks to make.

Expense of Manufacturing Tools

The molds, forming tools and other similar tools used in manufacturing are frequently quite expensive and for a number of reasons cannot be stockpiled in the event that something would happen to the primary tools. Tools that have a long lead time should be identified. Should the company be planning a future expansion of operations, the purchase of tools known to be required may be cost justified. Obviously any warehoused tools should be stored separately from the primary site.

Unique Manufacturing Components

Modern manufacturing techniques utilize state of the art robotics, assembling processes, inventory management systems, filters, bottles, etc. Again, determining the lead time and assurance of multiple sources of the critical components is key to understanding the true length of recovery. Use of sole source suppliers is a risky proposition. Alternate suppliers should always be identified and validated. If there is no secondary source, company inventory should be maintained at a level adequate to compensate for an interruption and rebuild of a supplier's operations.

Unique Operating Environment

Some manufacturing environments must maintain an air quality that is cleaner than the cleanest hospital operating room. The restoration of this clean environment is a key factor in planning for alternate facilities, vendors, equipment, and locations. It may limit the choice of sites or type of facility. A silicon wafer fabrication facility is a prime example of this unique environment.
In addition to the extreme difficulty of reproducing and maintaining the cleanliness, the chemicals used in this same environment are not only frequently dangerous in their own right, but they are catastrophic when combined. Examples are: hydrogen, sulfuric, fluoric, hydrochloric acids, oxygen, corrosives, caustics, etc.
Many manufacturing sites working with sensitive electronics components must maintain an anti-static environment even under recovery conditions.

ISO 9000

ISO 9000 certification is an external recognition of quality within the manufacturing environment that many organizations have worked extremely hard to obtain. ISO 9000 requires that how the company operates is well documented. Any planning professional will recognize that in a recovery situation, how the manufacturing lines and processes are restored may not be as originally constructed or documented. Provisions and procedures need to be created to ensure flexibility and speed yet maintain the quality required by the certification. However, most organizations will feel that maintaining certifications is secondary to the requirements for survival.


Process Machines

Where the historical focus has been recovery of mainframe data processing systems, similar practices and focus have not been applied to those systems used to control manufacturing operations. While the same issues exist for these systems, they have been overlooked or put far back in the cue. Like many other critical elements of manufacturing they are not off the shelf items that can be easily acquired from vendors in a short time frame. In many cases, the software has been modified and the hardware configuration is customized based on the operations it is controlling. The type, age, and version of the platform may be a problem. Should the architecture no longer be supported by the manufacturer, replacement of destroyed hardware may not be possible.

Documentation

In order to recover the manufacturing operations, the documentation to guide the reconstruction of those operations is critical. Without the documented specifications, time will be lost as people try to duplicate the lines from their memory alone. Obviously this would cause avoidable delays in the reconstruction process. Subsets of critical documentation should be maintained off-site in a form immediately usable by the recovery teams.

Exercising The Plans

There truly are limitations on how the manufacturing plan can be exercised and validated. Very few companies are willing or able to shut down a line and start up a second line to prove the plan will work. However, the plan can be exercised in a desktop exercise involving all major parties to the recovery effort. Availability of personnel, vendors, raw materials, supplies and services can all be validated and exercised against a feasible scenario that could shut down operations. Some elements of the plan involving systems, network and communications can be fully exercised without impacting the production environment. Requirements such as major construction projects or a move of operations should be considered as opportunities to exercise the major components of the plans.