Industry News

Buncefield Oil depot fire Disaster Recovery Aftermath

Following the Buncefield oil depot fire in Hemel Hempstead, document management and imaging company Version One has researched the views of Finance Directors from 100 UK organisations.

According to Version One, the purpose of the research was to discover whether their businesses could survive the total destruction of all hard-copy business documents, such as invoices, purchase orders, statements, payroll, despatch notes and other forms of paper documentation.

30% of finance directors surveyed said that they would never recover if their paper business documents were destroyed by a fire, flood or terrorist attack.

32% of organisations said they would take at least a year to recover. The remaining 38% said it would take about six months to recover, despite 60% of organisations claiming to have business continuity plans in place.

Version One said that the financial cost of all business documents 'going up in smoke' was also significant. All organisations would incur some financial cost with 45% incurring at least £50,000. 32% of organisations would incur between £100,000 and £800,000 and 15% would have financial costs of more than £1 million!

Key concerns by organisations (if all paper documents were destroyed) include 'critical documents would be lost forever', 'there would be legal and VAT implications' and 'the business would lose SOX compliance'.

In addition, some organisations stated that the destruction of all its hard-copy documents would:

• Cause the business to go under
• Be catastrophic
• Be a nightmare
• Result in redundancies
• Make it virtually impossible to chase debt

"This highlights the complete absence of measures organisations are taking to ensure business continuity" commented Tony Bray, director at Version One. "Many organisations think disasters such as the devastating fire at Buncefield just won't happen to them." Bray said such a mentality was extremely alarming. "The only way organisations can ensure all business documents are protected in the event of a fire or flood, is by electronically storing all documentation from invoices and purchase orders through to despatch notes and technical drawings as well as keeping back-up copies off-site" he added. "Not only is electronically storing all incoming and outgoing documents common sense from a business continuity point of view, it also saves significant amounts of time, money and storage space."