How to Use ISO Standards to Handle this Crisis or Pandemic Situation?

There is a little doubt that every pandemic causes damage to businesses worldwide – not only is there the matter of a decrease in demand for products or services, but there’s also the matter of the way to organize an organization to deliver their products and services in an exceedingly very different way.

CHALLENGES WITH PANDEMICS IN AN EXCEEDINGLY MODERN BUSINESS WORLD

So, what’s a pandemic? As per Merriam-Webster dictionary, a virulent disease is “an outbreak of a disease that happens over a good geographic region and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population.”

From the business operations point of view, for many companies this implies

  • Your customers or employees cannot reach you, or
  • Your customers or employees can reach you but are afraid for his or her own health.

To address the primary problem, companies start reacting within the following ways:

  • They overcome the dearth of physical contact with customers and employees by using electronic means of communication;
  • They ask their employees to use alternative places to figure, mostly from their homes or other remote locations; That they use alternative channels for delivery of their products through outsourced logistics services.

HOWEVER, BY MAKING THESE CHANGES, COMPANIES FACE SEVERAL CHALLENGES:

By drastically changing the way their business operates, the continuity of their operations is endangered. By accessing data from employees’ private devices and their homes, and by processing data through various cloud service providers and logistics partners, the protection of data is additionally endangered. Finally, this new way of doing business requires differing types of skills from both employees and partners within the supply chain, therefore the quality of delivering products and services is endangered.

To address the second problem – health & safety – companies are beginning to require protective equipment for his or her staff and introduce rules for social distancing not emotional distancing. However, the matter is that they are doing not know if this is often being done adequately, and that they don’t know if this may satisfy their customers and partners.

But there's some good news: ISO standards can facilitate you to address these challenges.

ADDRESSING CONTINUITY OF OPERATIONS

ISO 22301 is the standard that describes the way to develop the Business Continuity Management System – it defines that you simply need to assess the risks that may disrupt your operations and your supply chain, analyze how quickly you would like to recover to avoid high damage, and which resources you would like for a recovery. Supported this information, you would like to seem for solutions that may enable you to recover and to develop a business continuity plan for a pandemic situation.

ADDRESSING SECURITY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND DATA

ISO 27001 is the standard that describes the way to develop the Information Security Management System – it defines that, first, you have got to search out which potential incidents might happen, and so define which styles of safeguards you would like to implement so as to stop data breaches.

ADDRESSING QUALITY OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

ISO 9001 is the standard that describes the way to develop the Quality Management System – among other things, it defines that you simply need to train your employee adequately for the duty they’re performing, and you would like to pick out your suppliers and partners very carefully.

ADDRESSING HEALTH & SAFETY

ISO 45001 is the standard that describes the way to create an Occupational Health & Safety Management System (OHSMS) that helps you transcend simply meeting the health & safety laws and regulations and work towards improvement of the health & safety in your workplace. This will help to identify hazards and their associated risks, so they will be controlled to boost health & safety.

ISO STANDARDS PROVIDE YOU WITH THE KNOW-HOW

A crisis or pandemic doesn’t happen fairly often, and one would expect that in such unpredictable circumstances the foundations must be invented on the go – however, ISO 22301, ISO 27001, ISO 9001, and ISO 45001 are ready-made frameworks which will be applied effectively even in adverse situations.

After all, over 3 million companies worldwide have already implemented a number of the ISO management standards and, out of these, about 1.5 million got certified. So, ISO standards are the foremost widely adopted frameworks that help companies organize better.

For more information, contact ISOQAR via sales@isoqarindia.com

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