Business Continuity Plan?

Good afternoon. We are a relatively specialized, small-to-mid sized food manufacturer, and it seems difficult to make an arrangement with another company to enable them to manufacture products for our customers in the event we were out of business for a period of time. Especially since we are normally in competition with these manufacturers. I would be interested to know how you have addressed this aspect of the business continuity plan.

Frank, are you working on SQF 8.0?

I ask, because the BCP was a part of 7.2, but now in 8.0 there is no BCP.

Thank you for that clarification, Glenn.I guess there is now the crisis management plan, but the requirement to have a back-up manufacturer is not required. Thank you!

can you explain the difference between the Business continuity plan and the Crisis Management Plan?  I have done the business continuity plan and drills in the past, which you say we don't need to do any longer but to me I don't see much of a difference between the two plans.  I did training under the FDA crisis management.  To me it seems like it is just a chain of custody of who does what when you have a crisis.  Is that all they are looking for?

They're basically the same thing. My crisis management plan includes the following items:

1. Identify crisis management team, backups, and primary decision makers.

2. Identify critical systems (power etc.) and include contact info and primary employee manager

3. Identify reasonable anticipated crisis (fire, flood, power outage, structure failure, epidemic, boil notice from water provider) and list out some expected actions (e.g. alternative water treatment, refrigeration procedures in power outage)

4. Create a basic process flow for responding to crisis (safety>product control>Safe production>modifications to keep business running)

My test was an actual scenario (truck crashed into building dock) and we went through the flow and made sure all resources were available and we identified all the risks to both immediate quality, production control, and what we would do to keep business running and inform customers of issues.

Also, the crisis management plan is not mandatory. I'm also at a small place where if there were a crisis, we just wouldn't be able to produce (couldn't afford co packer, process not identical, co packer would be completion)

I am in the midst of explaining this section away expanding on what i mentioned above

Crisis management plan not mandatory? We almost got a minor for not having performed a Crisis Mgmt drill yet this year (We had performed a Business Continuity exercise last year that did not encompass the potential situations mentioned in the Crisis Mgmt section i.e. basically was a food recall scenario). Luckily I was able to show the auditor that we had one scheduled later this year. 

Crisis management plan not mandatory? We almost got a minor for not having performed a Crisis Mgmt drill yet this year (We had performed a Business Continuity exercise last year that did not encompass the potential situations mentioned in the Crisis Mgmt section i.e. basically was a food recall scenario). Luckily I was able to show the auditor that we had one scheduled later this year. 

It's not a mandatory element in the code, but unless you have clarified an exemption with your CB it's likely to be a minor.

The guidance states that for some very small facilities crisis management may be combined with the recall plan. I assume that's why it's not a mandatory element, as they still expect it to be addressed in the recall plan if it doesn't have it's own dedicated policy.

Thanks Scampi. We are doing similarly.

I also want to add that this section speaks very specifically about FOOD SAFETY and not business continuity. this facility has a shelf stable finished product, has a low likely hood of act of god or vandalism.....so for us this is a make work exercise

That is similar to our situation .....