In order to ensure long-term success, organizations must build resilience in their operations, evaluate how their demands could evolve, and create plans with flexibility and agility.

Operational resilience is the embedding of capabilities, processes, behaviorurs, and systems which allow an organization to continue to carry out its mission, in the face of disruption regardless of its source. Organizations are investing more into this protective discipline in order to anticipate, protect and plan for recovery.

A resilient organization will demonstrate key traits in the way that it operates: adaptable with agile leadership that governs robustly. A resilient organization will benefit from:

• Strategic adaptability – giving them the ability to handle changing circumstances successfully, even if this means moving away from their core business. 

• Agile leadership – allowing them to take measured risks with confidence and respond quickly and appropriately to both opportunity and threat.

• Robust governance –demonstrating accountability across organizational structures, based upon a culture of trust, transparency, and innovation, ensuring they remain true to their vision and values.

To learn more about achieving resilience throughout the whole of your organization, download our whitepaper here.

Why is operational resilience needed?

Most service businesses are thoroughly re-examining their operations.

For many organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic marked a critical shift in customer demand that are unprecedented in both magnitude and suddenness. In order to adapt and continue to grow, service organizations have had to look critically at their end-to-end processes to mitigate risks in improving operational effectiveness under changing conditions.

Taking practical steps to streamline working practices, supply chain logistics, and automating processes are crucial for the minimization of future disruption in operations. 

For businesses long-term, having resilient operations means that they are more likely to be able to adapt and survive any future crisis, reducing costs, potential losses and protecting future profitability.

What are the operational resilience standards?

Operational resilience standards can help organizations achieve operational resilience in several important ways:

Quality Management Standards for Service Provision

In order to remain competitive during their recovery period and in the service landscape of the future, organizations need to ensure now more than ever, that they are providing services of the highest quality. This will allow them to retain customers, inspire trust and maintain a strong brand reputation.

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, holiday service providers found themselves struggling to provide a high-quality service to their customers in the face of unprecedented refund requests and holiday booking cancellations. This has led to many of these companies gaining a poor reputation, which might have a negative impact on their future profitability.

BS EN ISO 9001 is the internationally recognized Quality Management System (QMS) standard that can benefit any size organization. Designed to be a powerful business improvement tool this standard can help you to continually improve, streamline operations and reduce costs, win more business and compete in tenders, satisfy more customers and be more resilient and build a sustainable business.

Innovation Standards and the Automation of Practices

For many service organizations, core customer functions are being squeezed both by an inability to perform on-site activities, such as paper-based processing and by limitations on off-site capacity. Global service partners face many of the same operational constraints in scaling up remote work to provide customer care or back-office support. Taking an accelerated approach to process automation has the potential to alleviate both challenges—such as at industrial manufacturers that are now deploying artificial intelligence to automate warranty claims, reducing both cycle time and paperwork.

The BS EN ISO 56000 series helps organizations introduce an innovation management system to identify the most important challenges, capture the right ideas, seize the best opportunities and properly manage emerging trends and risks. Whilst internationally recognized BS EN ISO/IEC 27001 is an excellent framework that helps organizations manage and protect their information assets so that they remain safe and secure. It helps organizations to continually review and refine the way they do this, not only for today but also for the future.

Managing Supply Chain Risks

Service organizations need to tackle the task of getting their supply to match changing demand, creating flexibility in their operations. 

For some service organizations, such as grocery, pharmacy, and logistics, that need has already driven rapid hiring and the implementation of hazard pay to secure frontline capacity. In other service sectors, cross-skilling and thoughtfully redeploying staff provide important flexibility for ramping up operations during recovery.

BS ISO 31000 is the international standard for risk management. By providing comprehensive principles and guidelines, this standard helps organizations with their risk analysis and risk assessments. It applies to most business activities including planning, management operations, and communication processes. 

BS ISO 44001 can be used to manage relationships on several different levels whether service organizations need to focus on a single application between operating divisions within their supply chain, or more complex relationships like consortia and joint ventures.

Ensure your service organization is achieving best practices by adding these operational resilience standards to your collection today.

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