ABC Railways took a crucial step towards ensuring customer satisfaction and business success by identifying its important business services. This involved determining the critical services that, if disrupted, could cause intolerable harm to customers, or impact the business' safety and soundness. After completing this step, ABC Railways identified train operations (running trains), passenger safety, and ticketing as important business services.
Resource
mapping
Important business
services identification
Important business
services identification
Resource
mapping
Being clear on the important business services enabled ABC Railways to identify and document how its resources (people, processes, technology, facilities, and information) fit together to deliver these essential services – in this case for example trains, staff, signalling systems, and suppliers.
This exercise helped ABC Railways understand its resource dependencies, material third parties, and internal silos.
ABC Railways utilised the outputs from steps 1 and 2 to establish impact tolerances for each important business service. These tolerances included the maximum duration of time that each service could be unavailable before it would significantly impact both the company's safety and soundness, as well as its customers – such as the extent of a delay that was seen as intolerably harmful to their customers.
Impact tolerance
setting
Impact tolerance
setting
ABC Railways has been able to improve its ability to respond to disruptions through its ongoing scenario testing programme.
The programme includes a range of severe but plausible disruption scenarios that ABC Railways uses to test its ability to stay within its impact tolerances.
Recently, the company conducted a series of tests that simulated various disruptions, including IT failures, extreme weather, and labour strikes, to evaluate its preparedness and assess the impact on customers. These tests have helped the company to learn, adapt, and improve its response and recovery strategies. In cases where vulnerabilities were identified, the ABC Railways Board allocated additional funding to remediate them, recognising that the costs, were the events to occur, would have been much more significant.
Scenario testing
and remediation
Scenario testing
and remediation
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4
