Contingency Plans
Main goal of such plans is to assure business continuity. If it is seen from a quality point of view the goal is to maintain production output to deliver according customer request by respecting customer requirements.
Entry point is the risk identification. Depends of contingency plan scope, the risks falls in several categories:
- quality: risks related to manufacturing processes, equipment (key equipment), needed infrastructure
- supply chain: provided products, services or outsourced processes (risk related to delivery stop or nonconforming delivered products)
- environment: natural disasters, pandemic
- infrastructure: IT (risks related to cyber-attacks), interruption of infrastructure related services (gas, water, electricity..)
Start from identified risks the necessary contingency plans has to be defined taking in consideration the effect of identified risk. Then, the plans has be implemented by establishing rules (procedures, instructions, interfaces..) and perform trainings necessary to finish the implementation.
To check the effectiveness of plans (are they really works and provides necessary results) we need to plan and implement methods like simulation and test.
By evaluation the results we can establish if an improvement needed and if it is needed to establish the necessary actions.