First Anniversary of the 2007 Summer Floods:-
UKita Announces the Launch of the SME Continuity Action Forum (SMECAF)
UKita is pleased to announce the launch of the SME Continuity Action Forum (SMECAF), one year after the start of the 2007 summer flood with the UK Government’s publication of the Pitt Review “Lessons Learned” report.
The floods exposed the huge vulnerability of the SME community to environmental shocks and clearly highlighted the need for support in becoming more resilient.
Anecdotal evidence is that 40% of small businesses that suffered severe flood damage have never re-launched their businesses. Previous case studies have shown that another 40% that restart after a serious mishap do not survive the following 18 months.
It was to mitigate this appalling local catastrophe and national reduction in economic wealth that the UKita’s Business Continuity Special Interest and Innovation Group (BC-SIIG) began to pose questions and seek answers relating to Business Continuity and SME’s.
So began a year in which a number of relationships were forged with both public and private SME stakeholders (including Chambers, Councils, Business Links, Universities, Trade Associations and Federations); the intention being to embrace the resources of Academia to answer a number of key questions to support stakeholders in their dealings with SME’s. The SMECAF proposal and its associated studies are strongly supported by SME stakeholders.
Initially, there are set to be two Masters Projects undertaken as “proof of concept”, with one each at Coventry and Hull Universities. The studies will look at issues such as:
• Operations which are critical to SME’s and hence vulnerable to BC events.
• What factors account for those SME’s that recover, versus those that do not?
• How can SME’s be better engaged with, in order not to repeat the same mistakes?
• Accepting that some climate change is inevitable, how do we create better resilience?
ICT is but one small part of the Business Continuity (BC) spectrum. Other aspects of BC include overflow accommodation, cashflow, communication, social interaction and HR issues. In order to provide a platform for the anticipated studies, UKita has endorsed the setting up of SMECAF as a UKita sub-group.
The 2007 summer floods may (or may not) be directly attributable to global warming, but there is little doubt amongst scientists that the frequency of such events is set to increase. Therefore, global warming may be seen as a long-term threat to “business as usual” requiring action by way of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. As the year progressed, other potential threats to “business as usual” began to emerge, including the credit crisis and commodity inflation.
Environmental threats have been expanded to include fire, drought and wind damage. Man made threats include arson, burglary, vandalism, terrorism, fraud, identity theft and computer crime
Therefore, the SMECAF remit has been expanded to include anything which threatens to disrupt SME’s from “steady state progress and on going survival”.
SMECAF does not suggest that there is a single antidote but preliminary discussions and research have indicated that sensible precautions can build a resilient, self reinforcing palisade that will simultaneously fend off multiple threats. SMECAF is launched as a ‘one-stop shop’ to provide advice and signpost solutions affordable to the SME community.
Current SMECAF-supported projects include:
• Floods-related studies.
• Diversion of waste from landfill in response to rising commodity prices and increasing cost of using land fill sites.
• Novel funding mechanisms for microgeneration.
• Greater home/remote working as a cost-saving resilience tool.
SMECAF is supportive of individual SME’s offering solutions to BC issues, notably FOCAL-Earth (www.focal-earth.com) which is highly active in the Transport and Logistics sector. Alongside UKita, FOCAL-Earth has been utilised as a blueprint for SMECAF’s support of SME’s. Ordinarily, SME’s will be referred to SMECAF for assistance by one of the stakeholders, in cases where standard assistance packages are deemed inappropriate or insufficient.
Funding continues to be provided by PCMAYDAY.COM (www.pcmayday.com) and SecureVirtualOffice (www.securevirtualoffice.com), two SME’s who are also founder members of UKita’s BC-SIIG. There is no other commercial sponsorship or Government funding in place at the time of writing; the aim being to make SMECAF investment-ready over the next 12-18 months by proving its ability to deliver added-value to the SME community.
For anyone who is interested in learning more and/or who wishes to be associated with SMECAF, please call David Gibson on 07957 357789 or email enquiries@smecaf.org.
Watch this space!
LINKS:-
The Pitt Review
UKita’s Submission to The Pitt Review
UKita’s Response to The Pitt Review (when created)