Learning From the Post Earthquake Resiliency of Japanese Companies

Some of the larger businesses that were impacted by the recent Japanese earthquake were able to overcome the disaster and recover remarkably quickly.

How did some companies recover so fast? By being both prepared and working with resources outside of their companies, such as vendors and building the redundancy into the manufacturing and supply chain processes.

In a recent article written by Michael Koploy titled The Post-Tsunami Supply Chain All-Stars | Who Recovered the Fastest and How? he details how some of these companies overcame the worst earthquake in Japanese history.

Check out his article to glean more insight in what these companies did differently and learn what you should be doing at your business.

Yours Truly Featured In Quote On National Best Seller

About a year ago I was asked to review the book Handbook To Practical Disaster Preparedness For The Family.

Since then, the book has become a national best seller and the new expanded and updated second edition has come out. I am also proud to be featured in a quote on the front cover of the book after reviewing the first edition.

Below is an image of the front cover. This book truly is a must read.

Disaster Preparedness Blog Now Available On Kindle

Love to read Disaster Preparedness Blog? Now you can take it with you and have it at your fingertips as well as obtain recent posts automatically through the kindle or kindle app on your pc or smart phone.

Disaster Preparedness Blog Kindle Edition

Wine Owner Suffers $1 Million Loss After Accident

In the last few years there have been a number of mishaps involving wine and wineries resulting in losses impacting their businesses. The latest of these events involves the estimated loss of more than $1 million worth of 2010 Mollydooker Velvet Glove Shiraz.

Sparky Marquis, the owner of Mollydooker wines was planning to ship the wines to the United States to formally launch the wine for the first time. With only one case of the 462 cases surviving the fall, the launch will now have to wait. The wine was valued at 185 Australian dollars per bottle ($200 U.S.).

As I mentioned earlier, this is not the only mishap to occur in the wine industry in the last few years.

Consider what you would do if the following occurred at your winery:

• Contamination from cleaning solvents used in the bottling process ruins $60,000 worth of wine.
• An employee doesn’t turn off a tank valve, and you lose 20,000 gallons of wine due to leakage.
• An employee accidently drives a forklift into a wine tank, causing the tank to collapse and the wine to spill out, potentially resulting in $100,000 in damages.

Several years ago a massive fire broke out at a wine storage facility causing $2,000,000 in losses and wiping out entire inventories of wine.  

Coupling my love of wine with business continuity planning I wanted to us this post to show that nearly any business can benefit from proper contingency planning. Why? With proper planning many of these mishaps do not have to result in the complete loss of inventories, income, or even result in complete business disruptions.  

I'll be doing an upcoming post on what you can do to implement a business continuity plan at no cost.

Terrorists Seeking Ways to Surgically Implant Explosives into Fliers on International Flights

According to an NBC newswire federal authorities have notified airlines overseas that have flights coming into the United States that terrorists are seeking to create “human bombs” by surgically implanting them inside of a potential suicide bomber.

There is no current indication of an actual threat at this time, but groups are seeking to find ways of carrying out this type of attack. It is important to note here that if they can employ such a device the airlines will not be the only targets and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell if someone is carrying a device in a crowd.

People will have to increasingly rely on things that look out of place and the level of anxiety among other things to locate potential attackers.