It has the capacity to handle in excess of 3.4m items of mail per day and counts the likes of major high-street banks, building societies and insurance companies among its list of clients. And if that weren’t impressive enough, this printing business makes a profit even when it’s not printing – sometimes periods of downtime can stretch to as long as nine months yet it still remains profitable. How so? It provides business continuity support to blue chip companies who can’t afford to let any production glitches, large or small, stand in the way of getting time- and business-critical jobs out the door.
The eponymously named Business Continuity, which was set up more than a decade ago by Danny Brock and Mark Allan, hit the headlines earlier this year when it stepped into the fold to take up the slack for Home Retail Group when its print provider BemroseBooth fell into administration.
While the company may operate at the very top end of the industry, business continuity, or disaster recovery planning, has grown in importance for large and small companies over the past few years, moving further up the scoring charts for clients. All businesses need to prepare for the unknown – whether that’s creating a contingency plan in case a work lottery syndicate hits the jackpot and resigns simultaneously, or whether it’s a fire or flood caused by problems beyond a company’s control (see case studies).
So what kind of measures can businesses put in place to ensure that if disaster strikes the business need not be adversely affected?
Be prepared
Preparation, above all other factors, is key when establishing a continuity plan, according to the experts. One way to prepare is to envisage a series of worst case scenarios that might hit your business and work out what the affect would be and how you might mitigate against it. Some of these issues you can probably get around on your own by simply employing common sense – for instance, if your presses are out of action you might be able to outsource outstanding orders to another printer locally, you could establish an off site server with remote access so that you can access data from any computer and you could take temporary space in a serviced office if your premises are closed.
If the planning process is too daunting to do on your own, thankfully help is at hand from consultants such as Simon Edkins. Edkins, managing director of the Print Circle, a network of print consultants, advises companies on how to devise a business continuity strategy among other things.
"One of the key things that I advise people to do is to set up a reciprocal arrangement with one or two other printers whereby if you can’t print a job they’ll do it for you," explains Edkins. "All you’ve got to do is run some tests and make sure you can retrieve the artwork and that they can print it to the same standard that you were printing it. You should also pre-agree the prices because if you don’t you’ll get skinned."
While this may be business continuity planning at its most basic, this approach will only work if you’re properly managing your data. One business that regularly offers advice to customers on business continuity planning and the management of data is Shuttleworth. Joint managing director Paul Deane says that this advice ranges from pretty low-level stuff, like having an external drive off-site providing back-up, right through to more complex technologies, such as virtualisation.
"Virtualisation enables you to create an operating system environment that is independent of the hardware that it runs on. Therefore you can firstly run multiple server environments on one piece of hardware, which reduces hardware costs, and secondly you can take that virtual server environment and load it on any other piece of hardware and have it back up and running immediately," explains Deane.
Shuttleworth is also doing its bit to help customers by building back-up measures into the company’s products such as an after-image file function.
"In theory if your system crashes you would lose all transmissions since the last back-up, but in the event of a failure you can load the after-image file, which means that you won’t lose a singe transaction," he explains.
Take the pressure
However, the main piece of advice that Deane offers customers when it comes to business continuity planning is to make sure that their infrastructure is as robust as possible. "The level of automation that modern printing companies have is putting a huge pressure on infrastructure. You have to invest in infrastructure so that it supports your business." Of course the other investment option open to companies is to pay someone like Business Continuity – or rival UK disaster recovery outfit Critical Mail Continuity Services, in Telford – to bear the strain for them should the worst occur. Business Continuity’s sales director Ian Murray says that increasing number of companies are approaching him about taking advantage of the businesses’ facility largely because of the strains that modern printing companies have to cope with (he fielded a noticeable rise in the number of enquires from blue-chips in the wake of BemroseBooth’s administration).
"People are running so close to the wire and pushing their equipment harder so when they have a hiccup it’s even harder to recover from it and that’s where we step in," says Murray.
Companies that sign up for Business Continuity’s service pay an annual subscription, which is calculated based on the amount of cover required, and then they have to pay an agreed rate should they need to use the facility. Murray says that the majority of issues that the company deals with are related to manpower problems but for vast swathes of time the machines in the factory sit idle.
"For the first three to four years that we were in business the facility was probably only used in anger twice but in the last year we’ve handled the BemroseBooth fallout and one other incident for a bank. Previous to that we hadn’t done anything since last September." The company regularly runs test files for customers to show that its machines are up to date but other than that the kit sits gathering dust, which is fine with the customers because what they are basically paying for is peace of mind. They need to know that should the worst case scenario occur they – or their print partner – has the ability to pick up the slack. This ability to offer customers such reassurances is a great sales pitch, according to the Print Circles Edkins.
"Business continuity is a good thing to do in its own right but it’s also a tool to retain and win new business. Nothing is going to embarrass a buyer more than appointing a printer who then can’t do the work, so having a plan in place is going to help your score." As the old business adage goes "if you fail to prepare, prepare to fail". But if you plan well in advance your business can recover from even the worst disaster.
CASE STUDY: Piccolo Press
It was the call that Tim Honnor has always dreaded. The managing director of Nairn-based letterpress printing company Piccolo Press was visiting family in Barbados for Christmas in 2009 when he got word that the water pipes in his factory had frozen and burst due to a heavy frost.
For three days water had poured into the building ruining the interior and £20,000 worth of paper. Honnor boarded the first plane back to the UK to assess the damage and immediately started putting in place a plan to get the business back up and running again.
Thankfully for Honnor, almost none of the firm’s kit was electrical so although a guillotine was lost the remaining kit could all be cleaned and put back into use. During the first few days Honnor says that his team were magnificent. "Heidelberg presses were being moved around the factory like chess pieces while the builders put in new floors, electrics and lighting," he explains.
As well as having a great team to fall back on, Honnor applauds the support of his insurer and insurance broker. "For 20 years we never had a claim and every year he would come over to see me and say ‘what have you got new? Don’t you think you should put this or that up?‘ Sometimes I thought that maybe he just wanted me to pay a bit more of a premium, but actually he was entirely right. It’s absolutely vital to review your insurance liability every year."
It was four months before the business fully recovered from the setback and Honnor believes the business is now on a much better platform. "At the end of the day although it was a traumatic experience for everybody and we lost some cashflow we’re now back on our feet so you could say there is a silver lining at the end of the cloud. It’s like a car crash: people think ‘it couldn’t happen to me’, but it does."
CASE STUDY: FFEI
When the Buncefield oil depot exploded in 2005, Andy Cook, managing director of FFEI, hadn’t a clue how bad the damage to his business would be. Cook and his team were only allowed access to their factory three days after the explosion and discovered that nothing was recoverable. The company would have to start again from scratch.
Fortunately for Cook, FFEI was at the time part of Fuji so it was required to have a disaster recovery plan, which had a particular emphasis on data management and which in Cook’s words was "fairly good and robust". This plan was regularly reviewed, however, it wasn’t watertight.
"We had off-site data storage, but the incident happened on a Sunday morning and we would usually leave the tapes to back up on Friday and then collect them on Monday morning, so they were lost," explains Cook. But this loss of data was the least of his worries. The business had no equipment and no premises to work out of.
In the original disaster recovery plan the intention was for FFEI to occupy space in one of Fuji’s numerous sites, but this proved logistically impossible because all of the staff were local to Buncefield. So Cook’s first task was to rent local office space. Within five working days the company’s email was back up and running, but it took another two weeks before Cook could start dealing with normal day-to-day business and on some projects FFEI didn’t get back up to speed for six months.
It was more than two and a half years before the company moved into permanent office space and although it was a harrowing experience, Cook says that he learnt a lot and that the business is now much stronger. He’s also confident that should the unthinkable happen again, things would be different.
"Because of the infrastructure we now have in place we would be up and running much quicker," says Cook. "As a result of the explosion there is also more rigour around the way that we manage our data." Another change has been on the insurance front. "When the explosion occurred we didn’t have business continuity insurance, we just had asset insurance. Today we have business continuity insurance and asset insurance."
