Business Continuity and Managed Resilience for Supply Chain
Summary
This case study shows how Volta helped a large quick-service restaurant buying co-op strengthen supply chain resiliency and business resilience.
Its old BCP was out of date, so the client worked with Volta to run impact and risk reviews, build plans across teams, test them in tabletop drills, and move to managed resilience.
The work improved efficiency, flexibility, onboarding, and plan upkeep. Those gains show the benefits of supply chain resilience.
Client
The client is the largest buying co-op in the quick-service restaurant industry. It handles more than $5.8 billion in yearly purchases and buys food, packaging, and equipment.
Since 1999, the company has used bulk buying to cut costs, keep supply steady, and support diverse suppliers. It has 300 employees at sites across the United States.
Challenge
In response to the prevalence of business-impacting breaches worldwide, the organization’s leadership initiated a thorough review of their own business continuity plan (BCP). A plan had been built years earlier, but it had not been updated on a regular basis.
Building and keeping a strong resilience plan is hard for many teams. The first version takes time, skill, and money. It often requires deep know-how and past experience.
Giving this job to an in-house leader, such as a Director of Operations, is hard because that person already has many duties. The work also needs cross-team support, and that can cause delays and stress. In short, it takes time, hurts morale, and tests patience.
Many teams also fail to keep revising the plan. A full BCP takes time and money to build, but it loses value fast if it is treated as a fixed set of steps instead of a living document that needs regular updates.
Solution
Once the client saw the need to improve its plan, it worked with Volta to build a new one.
Phase 1:
Volta conducted a comprehensive business impact analysis (BIA), followed by a detailed risk assessment. Based on these findings, Volta developed tailored business continuity plans (BCPs) for their operations branch, which included 7 departments. The client was so pleased with the results that we continued the process of creating plans for 15 other departments and lines of business in the organization.
Once the plans were finalized and approved, we facilitated a tabletop exercise to test their effectiveness. This exercise enabled the identification of gaps and areas requiring further refinement. Subsequently, Volta produced a thorough report highlighting these gaps and provided actionable recommendations for remediation strategies to enhance the overall resilience framework.
Completing this work typically requires six to twelve months, depending on the organization’s size. During this period, the executives recognized the substantial effort involved in developing the plan and concluded that they would prefer not to undertake this process again. This realization ultimately led to the addition of managed resilience to the scope of the engagement.
Phase 2:
Initially, the focus of the project was to conduct assessments and develop comprehensive documentation for the business continuity plan (BCP). Transitioning this effort into an ongoing managed resilience service required migrating the plans into our platform, enabling seamless viewing and operational management. Once integrated, these plans became dynamic and adaptive, allowing for continuous updates and efficient maintenance by our team.
The client can log in and view their plan as a living, breathing system of protection for their business. We meet with them quarterly to review updates and track any changes necessary to ensure continuity.
Results
Improved Efficiency: After working with Volta’s managed resilience team, the client had a smoother process for building and keeping its business continuity plan (BCP). Internal strain was lower, and output stayed strong because our team handled the hard parts of plan creation.
Enhanced Flexibility: With our help, the client’s BCP became a flexible, adaptive system. Regular updates and links to other systems keep the plans useful and ready for new threats and business changes. This flexibility supports faster incident response and easy changes in a fast-moving risk setting. The work also shows the benefits of supply chain resilience.
Simplified Training and Onboarding: Our service also makes onboarding easier for staff. Clear, step-by-step recovery guides replaced tribal knowledge. New hires can get ready for emergencies fast, and the time and work needed to train them drops a lot.
Proactive Maintenance and Updates: The client now gets ongoing updates and upkeep from our team. This removed worries about old or static plans, because we keep all documents in line with best practices and support supply chain robustness and resilience across teams.
Q&A
Question: Why did the client decide to review its business continuity plan?
Short answer: The leaders reviewed the plan after breaches around the world showed the risk of disruption, and they found that the old BCP had not been updated for years.
Question: What work did Volta complete during the first phase of the engagement?
Short answer: Volta ran a business impact analysis and risk review, built tailored BCPs for the operations branch and 15 more departments and lines of business, led a tabletop exercise, and delivered a report with gaps and fix steps.
Question: Why was managed resilience added to the scope of the project?
Short answer: After seeing that full BCP work could take six to twelve months and require a lot of effort, the client’s leaders did not want to repeat it by hand. Managed resilience let the plans stay current, updated, and easier to handle over time.
Question: How did Volta’s platform change the client’s approach to business continuity?
Short answer: By moving the plans into Volta’s platform, the BCP became a live system instead of a static file. The client can view and manage the plan online, while Volta supports quarterly reviews and ongoing updates to keep it in step with business change and new risks.
Question: What were the main benefits of the engagement?
Short answer: The work improved efficiency, flexibility, training, onboarding, and plan upkeep. It reduced the burden on internal teams, replaced tribal knowledge with step-by-step recovery guides, and helped keep the BCP current and useful.
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