How to Make A Disaster Recovery Plan for Manufacturing Company?

Manufacturing companies earn money with machines and labor and under the background of Industry 4.0, the businesses of manufacturing companies are increasingly relying on information technology like upgrading traditional production lines with all kinds of process automation solutions.

When enjoying the convenience of the automation solutions, managers should also know that the businesses of manufacturing companies can be influenced by many factors.

Common disasters in manufacturing companies

Knowing and preparing for potential risks can save companies in critical moments.

You need to not only analyze your actual environment, but also collect the cases from the Internet in case of missing any risks. There are some common disasters in manufacturing companies.

Natural disasters: There are many natural disasters in the world like hurricane, flood, fire, etc. They can destroy the equipment in the factory and cause a suspension in the production environment. Some of them are predictable but some of them are not so you should know how to protect the equipment and how to recover business as scheduled.

Power outage: Every production line need the power to manufacture goods. If there is a power outage, no one can run the machine with muscle. Usually, there will be a notification from the power company to let you plan for that but there are also some situations of unplanned power outages caused by a broken cable or other reasons. You should know if there is any chance to recover part of or the whole production lines with your solution.

Problematic production line: It involved the equipment and software. If the equipment is damaged for some reason, is there a worker who can repair it? If the system is not workable, is there anyone with IT knowledge who can fix it?

Data Loss: With the business systems deployed in  production system, more and more production data is generated. Data loss could be caused by human error, hardware failure, cyberattack, etc. Losing data is fatal to business so you should know how to prevent data loss and how to recover data in such a circumstance.

Why manufacturing companies need a disaster recovery plan?

Think of your production lines being suspended for days and you can't deliver the goods. What a disaster!

Manufacturing downtime will stop facility output. If the downtime lasts for days, you might not able to deliver the goods as scheduled. This will cause a loss of money and reputation.

Business continuity is important for manufacturing companies because it guarantees stable production and represents the power of a company. Many small businesses don't have a disaster recovery plan and if there is a long downtime in production lines, most of them will lose business in the future and never be open again.

Therefore, manufacturing downtime will cause both direct and indirect influence on business so having a disaster recovery plan is necessary for manufacturing companies.

It is also recommended to revise the primary plan with a checklist.

How to make a disaster recovery plan for manufacturing company?

To make sure you can recover business systems as soon as possible, you can create a plan in advance. There is a template for you.

1. Write down the business systems

You should not list the production systems like EBS, SPC, SCADA, etc. but also the business systems for management like PLM, OA, MES, ERP, SAP, etc.

You can group the systems with different standards or just mark their importance level.

2. Risk assessment

You can analyze the potential risks to the business system by inquiring the staff, searching them on the Internet, or consulting an expert.

The potential risks might include the power outage, natural disaster, human error, manufacturing downtime, data loss for ransomware, etc.

3. Recovery objective

Since you have grouped the systems], you can set the recovery objective according to their importance.

4. Find the solution

To guarantee the recovery objective can be realized, you should get the solutions from the Internet or experts.

In addition, compiling a document with the system issue description and solution will help the solution be smoothly executed.

5. Arrange a specialized team

There should be a team responsible for all kinds of system issues to make sure the compiled solution can be properly executed and avoid further damage to business.

They should be experts or at least trained with the expertise to solve the problems as soon as possible.

6. Test the solutions

Any solutions should be tested in the test environment before be handing out to the staff.

Backup and Disaster Recovery solution for VM and database

In the process of digitalization, many manufacturing companies also choose virtualization solutions to fully utilize the resources of physical server. Since many systems are running on VMs, you should know the way to protect VM.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a professional backup and disaster recovery solution for VM and database like VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, Red Hat Virtualization, oVirt, Oracle Linux KVM, OpenStack, MySQL Database, Oracle Database, SQL Server Database, etc.

Agentless backup will let you easily deploy the backup system and a user-friendly web console will help you easily create all kinds of backup and restore jobs.

Instant Recovery and Cross-Platform Migration will let you recover failed VM in 15 seconds and move VM to another hypervisor from its backup (not supported for Hyper-V for now). Ransomware protection will protect the backup storage to let you always have the right backup to recover VM.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery has helped many manufacturing companies protect virtual environment and you can also start to use this powerful system with a 60-day full-featured free trial. Just click the button to get the installation package.

Sum Up

In the age of information technology, manufacturing companies have deployed more and more business systems in factories. The intricate systems are vulnerable to all kinds of disasters so to protect business continuity and the revenue and reputation of company, you can follow the tips and use the template in this post to build a disaster recovery plan.

VM is often used to deploy business systems and Vinchin Backup & Recovery can help you easily backup and restore VM. Don't miss the free trial.