A Disaster Recovery Planning Guide - On how to mitigate the supply chain disruption risks of a totally destroyed central warehouse

Abstract: The development of modern enterprises goes toward more complex supply chains with many links and worldwide transportation. The trend of using centralized warehousing as logistic setup has grown more popular during the last years. This development has created new risks and implied increased vulnerabilities for many enterprises. To manage these issues the area of Business Continuity Management has grown more important. This thesis contains an action oriented Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) Guide, which aims to ensure the continuity of critical activities in the event of a disaster and reduce the disruption of the company’s business. The guide is mainly applicable for a central warehouse but can be applied on other logistic setups. The foundation of the guide comprises studies of literature, a case study of DeLaval’s central warehouse in Hamburg and some documented mini cases. The preliminary guide was tested on three experts, which resulted in some adjustments to form the final DRP-Guide.