Business Continuity Programme for a Cross-Border Logistics Firm

Business challenge

A cross-border logistics firm wanted real confidence that they could keep operating through a major IT outage or supplier failure.

Operational risk

Leadership had no real confidence the business could keep operating through a major IT outage. EDI dependencies across customers and customs systems created cascading exposure that nobody owned.

Potential impact

A multi-modal disruption would have triggered demurrage on containers, missed customs windows, breach notifications across multiple jurisdictions and likely loss of at least one of the top three customer accounts.

Approach

We built a tiered business continuity programme, ran a tabletop exercise with the leadership team, and refined the plan based on what actually broke under pressure.

Actions taken

• Built a tiered business continuity programme with named recovery time and recovery point objectives per customer
• Documented manual fallback procedures for EDI, customs declarations and customer comms
• Ran a tabletop exercise with the leadership team that deliberately broke the plan to expose hidden assumptions
• Embedded the plan in the operations cadence so it survives staff turnover and system change

Outcome achieved

The team has since handled two real outages with no customer-visible disruption. The programme is now a differentiator in their tender responses.

Lessons learned

• Continuity plans that have not been tested under pressure are aspirations, not plans
• The biggest gap is usually authority, not technology: deciding in advance who can declare an incident saves hours
• A credible continuity programme is now a tender differentiator with large logistics buyers