A leading national logistics provider and wholesaler employing around 5,000 people, depends on the seamless operation of its IT systems to manage warehousing, distribution, and customer orders. With logistics processes closely interlinked across the value chain, even brief interruptions could have had wide-reaching effects. To ensure resilience and maintain operations under all circumstances, the company decided to strengthen its Business Continuity Management (BCM) with the support of Axians Business Resilience’s dedicated team.
The company’s BCM manager sought structured guidance to better understand process dependencies and critical resources. The challenge lies in the high reliance on central ERP and warehouse management systems that underpinned nearly all core business functions. While existing emergency procedures could bridge short outages of up to two days, prolonged disruptions risked severely impacting order fulfillment and customer service.
Axians began by mapping the company’s complete process landscape, which had not been fully documented before. Using a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) and a structured risk assessment as a tiered filter, the team identified the processes and resources essential to business continuity. Through collaborative workshops with process owners and key stakeholders, possible disruption scenarios (such as IT outages, power failures, or loss of facilities) were evaluated to determine acceptable downtime thresholds and necessary response actions.
Axians implemented a structured six-step approach to develop a comprehensive BCM framework. The analysis revealed that beyond a two-day system outage, manual emergency measures would no longer suffice. To mitigate this, Axians and the client co-designed an alternative operating model based on predefined product assortment packages that could be used during system downtime. Initially conceived as a flexible “Top 300” assortment concept, the model was refined into a manageable set of packages per product category, ensuring operational feasibility, billing compatibility, and compliance with customer agreements.
This final solution ensured that customers could only choose packages aligned with their agreements, providing both control and continuity. The result was a robust, transparent, and effective BCM system that significantly enhanced the company’s resilience and preparedness.
Through close cooperation and structured analysis, consultants from Axians Business Resilience helped the logistics provider establish a sustainable continuity strategy that ensures operations can continue even under pressure, keeping deliveries moving when it matters most.