Effective business continuity planning has allowed
clothes retailer Primark to restart its supply chain 48 hours after
fire destroyed its principal stock warehouse last Tuesday (1
November 2005).
The retailer, which has outsourced its supply chain operations
to TNT, maintained the flow of critical stock to its stores thanks
to TNTFashion Group ITdirector Jim Flood's decision to bypass the
usual distribution channels.
He re-routed stock coming into the UK directly to Primark's
stores while he created a new IT-based warehouse management
infrastructure for the trouble-hit retailer.
Flood said, "Our first priority was to get the warehouse
management system back up. The second priority was to provide the
necessary equipment for the new warehouse location."
As firefighters were damping down the remains of the Primark
warehouse in Lutterworth, Leicestershire, TNT's IT team were
kitting out a new unit a quarter of a mile away and deploying a
replacement warehouse management system hosted at a remote
datacentre.
The logistics company had disaster recovery contracts with all
of its IT suppliers.
When those contracts were invoked, TNT's suppliers were required
to deliver all of the equipment needed to run the replacement
warehouse as soon as possible.
By Wednesday afternoon TNT was uploading Primark data from daily
back-up tapes onto the datacentre-based warehouse management
system.
The tapes were recovered from a fireproof safe in a separate
building. TNTstores daily back-ups from the IT systems of all its
warehouses in secure local facilities.
On Thursday TNThad installed the hardware needed to run the
warehouse management system locally and connected the new site to
its national network, provided by BT.
The management system, Powerforce from Fraser Williams, is run
on an HP Unix cluster. "As it is a cluster, in the event of
anything other than a fire, it is pretty fault tolerant," said
Flood.
Protecting the supply chain
Primark's success in restoring its systems highlights the need
to ensure suppliers have adequate business continuity plans, said
Rory Graham, outsourcing specialist at law firm Baker &
McKenzie.
It is a matter of course for large organisations to include
provision for business continuity in contracts, he said. But it was
not enough to see a policy. IT leaders must be convinced that
suppliers' plans can be put into practice.
A survey by Cable & Wireless in September revealed that
two-thirds of small and medium-sized firms in London and a third of
those outside the capital have no continuity plans.