ISO 22301:2012 is a management system standard for business continuity (BCMS).
It shares the same harmonized high-level structure of ISO 14001:2015 (environmental management) and ISO 45001:2018 (health & safety management). Business continuity is covered briefly in the environmental and health & safety management system standards.
ISO 14001:2015 has a section on “Emergency Preparedness and Response” (Section 8.2) to establish, implement, and maintain the processes needed to prepare for and respond to potential emergency situations identified in the planning section (6.1.1). The key focus is on how the organization prepares to respond by planning actions to prevent or mitigate adverse environmental impacts associated with emergency situations (i.e. as opposed to normal day-to-day operations). This helps assure the overall success of the EMS.
ISO 45001:2018 is the new occupational health & safety management system (OH&SMS) that will replace OHSAS 18001 over the next three years. It also has a section on “Emergency Preparedness and Response” (Section 8.6) to identify potential emergency situations, assess OH&S risk associated with these emergency situations in the planning section (6.1.2), and maintain a process to prevent or minimize OH&S risks from these potential emergencies. This includes situations not controlled by the organization and occurring near the workplace that can cause work-related injuries to workers or ill health.
Before examining how the business continuity can be integrated into the other management system standards, it is important to remember that each standard is written in the same plan-do-check-act (PDCA) format (see figure at top of article). This integration review is only going to be focused on how business continuity and organizational resilience can help broaden the sections of the two standards for which a comparison is being made and the benefits to the organization for doing so.
You can read the rest on my LinkedIn post here.
