Many accounting professionals are skilled in financial analysis, but most are not skilled in manufacturing. This is especially the case for process manufacturing environments. To provide professional accounting and financial services, one must understand the industry, product, and processes. We have an ethical responsibility to develop this understanding before offering services to clients in this area. Take a moment to discuss how you would obtain an understanding of key business processes of a company that hires you to provide financial services. Identify one industry and at least one process you would need to gain a better understanding. Use references, such as a professional journal or industry magazine for ideas.

The business impact analysis is the primary input to the business continuity plan. However, prior to doing this, you need to develop a list which ranks the key business processes of your business, that is, the processes that are essential to the delivery of outputs and achieving business objectives.[1]

This task is best undertaken with a structured approach and essentially requires you to:[2]

establish key business processes; Rank key business processes Map activities undertaken within each process; and Match resources to activities

Establish key business processes

As mentioned previously, it is crucial that the person developing the business continuity plan has full and clear understanding of your business' objectives and key processes. Your business plan is a great reference as it should already detail your business objectives and assessments of strategic and operational risks.

Rank key business processes

After the key business processes have been identified, you will need to rank them in order of their importance to achieving your business' objectives and delivering outputs When doing this process, you may want to consider the following issues:[3]

failure to meet statutory obligations for service delivery; failure to meet key stakeholder expectations; loss of cash flows essential to business operations; and degree of dependency on business processes by internal business units or clients Determine activities that constitute each process

The business activities supporting key business processes then need to be identified. These are the activities that produce an output from the key business process. These may be the activities of a single operational area in your business the organisation, or may be the activities of a number of operational areas, which combine to produce the output.[4]

Once again, a thorough understanding of activities is essential to identify such inter-dependencies. Some activities may rely on the outputs from other activities from within the organisation, or even from outside the organisation. For example, e-business solutions rely not only on the internal network but also on the internet service provider.

Match resources to activities

The final step in the BIA, is determining the resources necessary for delivery of the key business processes. Without these resources, the business processes would not achieve their goals. Some resources to consider are:

People - both the organisation's staff and people external to the organisation which may be critical to the success of the activity; Infrastructure - buildings and other property used by the organisation to deliver its services and produce its outputs; Assets and supplies - equipment and consumables which are used by the people and the processes as part of the activity; and Finance - some activities require money to be available to make payments on time.