Key Elements of Functional BCP - Post March 11 Survey Review

Abstract

The March 11 East Japan Earthquake/Tsunami and subsequent social infrastructure damage, including electricity shortages, gave serious impact to the Japanese economy and individual companies as well. Many companies that have been preparing for disasters were forced to face the severe test of whether their disaster measures, such as a disaster management and business continuity plan (BCP), functioned as planned. A post March 11 BCP survey was conducted, in which 286 companies located in the directly affected regions participated. Certain companies had to give up the resumption of operations, and other companies realized that their BCP had not totally functioned. There are companies, however, whose BCP had fully functioned. This paper focuses on what the differences were in pre-disaster measures and the BCP of those companies whose BCP functioned totally and those companies whose BCP did not function totally. This paper analyzed what key elements of the BCP functioned properly.