Message From MD – September 2018

Dear friends,

We never expected it to happen to us one day. So we watched it in movies light-heartedly. We never bothered to help, visit or act at any of the places where it had happened previously. We never created a better insulating model to prevent it taking away precious lives and we never used the available resources effectively. We always bothered to get divided into groups based on politics and religion to fight each other and we proved that we will never learn from mistakes.

I am sad, desperate and ashamed on the reason why we had to face the flood. We are all culprits for the loss of the lives of 400-odd human beings. If I cannot shout this much, then I might as well have flown along with the waters during the floods.
Failing to plan is planning to fail. With all of the natural disasters happening recently, it is only appropriate to take a good look at our company’s disaster plan to make sure we are prepared. If our documents, data, resources and people are important to us and if we cannot afford to have our business operations halted for weeks or days due to loss or corruption of the same, then we need to have a disaster management plan. A disaster can happen at any time on any day and is likely to occur at the most inconvenient time – after all, it’s Murphy’s Law!

A disaster is a sudden, unplanned event that creates an inability for a company to provide critical business functions for an undetermined period of time, resulting in great damage or loss to that organisation. Disasters can be widespread and severe, such as a fire, flood or earthquake, or more limited in the form of a server failure, virus attack or inadvertent deletion of data, or loss or theft of documents. But no matter how it is caused, it inevitably means a loss of revenue, a loss of productivity, a loss of reputation, and increased costs to the business. As we know, this time, we were not prepared, and we ran the risk of having the disaster come before we had in place a plan to handle it. By God’s grace, we marginally escaped this time without much issue.

We need to urgently create an action plan to face any kind of disaster to reduce our risk and at the same time protect our assets, documents, data, projects and stakeholders. Disasters can be averted with some foresight and planning. We should hire a trusted professional to write down a management plan for eventuality and also a communication plan for implementation.

Even without such a system in place, we were able to form a disaster management council which immediately and effectively worked together to protect our documents, data, projects, records, stakeholders, employees and customers. The service rendered was excellent and the relief activities volunteered by a few of the employees are commendable.

Now the floods are over, water has receded, but the wounds remain all over. Tough days are ahead, as market needs time to recover. Shortage of material and labour along with high demand may create rise in prices. We have to move carefully, together and united to safeguard our brand and create a new Kerala. We have a great mission to accomplish. God has chosen us to rebuild a country – His own country. Don’t give up.

Regards,
Sunil Kumar