Reliability of Supply Chains and Business Continuity Management

The importance of the adoption of business continuity plans is now well recognized by organizations all over the world. Whatever the business model, organizations are operating in an increasingly global, complex and risky context. Economic, social, political, technical, environment related events can interrupt core business. Natural disasters, diseases, terrorist attacks, strikes, financial crises, unreliable systems, logistics, supply chain failures, as well as unexpected lack of essential production inputs can severely impact growth and performance. The development of well-established plans that consider the identification of business interruption risks, the definition of strategic and tactical plans, proactive management and preparedness to respond should be a goal. Business Continuity plans consider vital issues to be observed by organizations to assure production. Reliability and risk assessment methodologies compose powerful tools to support those plans. With them it is possible to identify potential threats to an organization and their associated impacts to business operations, and to provide a framework for building organizational capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value creating activities. This paper presents topics that compose current standards concerning Business Continuity Management programs and examples of the use of reliability modelling, applied to Brazilian gas supply chain, and its importance for supporting BCM programs. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).