Unplanned downtime costs manufacturers more than $50 billion each year, according to recent figures from Forbes. And with the record-high rates of ransomware attacks in the manufacturing industry, these operational outages are becoming more disruptive than ever.
Below, we outline a basic manufacturing disaster recovery plan template to ensure your company has the right planning framework and tools to overcome any operational disruption.
Why is a Disaster Recovery Plan Important?
Disasters can have long-lasting repercussions for a manufacturing business, especially for smaller companies. But unfortunately, 68% of small-business owners do not have a written disaster recovery plan, putting them at risk of a wide array of disruptions.
Common causes of downtime in manufacturing:
- Equipment failure
- IT outages
- Fire and other on-site hazards
- Cyberattacks
- Data loss
- Staffing shortages
- Power/utility outages
- Numerous other disaster scenarios
While a disaster recovery plan will not prevent every disaster from happening, it does enable manufacturers to manage their response in an efficient and measured way. Proper planning ensures that your company can resume operations as quickly as possible, minimizing financial losses.
Who Needs a Disaster Recovery Plan?
Creating a comprehensive disaster recovery plan is important for manufacturing businesses of every size. Even if you operate a small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), it’s critical that your operations can sustain an unexpected outage. According to FEMA, around 25% of businesses permanently close following a disaster, and this number is even higher for small businesses with limited financial capital. Choosing to develop a disaster recovery plan is simply good business sense.
What Should a Disaster Recovery Plan Include?
Every disaster recovery plan should be carefully tailored and customized to the manufacturer it’s created for. It isn’t wise to simply copy and paste a plan from another organization because it will not meet your needs or account for the unique risks and operational vulnerabilities of your business. However, there are some fundamental sections that should generally appear in every disaster recovery plan.
Here’s a basic template your company can use as a starting point, followed by brief explanations of what to include in each section.
Manufacturing Disaster Recovery Plan Template· Plan Goals · Risk Assessment & Impact · Personnel · Recovery Procedures · Medical Response · Contingency Locations · IT Business Continuity · Data Redundancy · Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective · Asset Management · Communication · Physical Device and Document Storage · Drills and Evaluations · Plan Review & Update Schedule
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Plan Goals
Identify the objectives that your plan is meant to accomplish. This provides clarity over the scope and focus of the plan, especially if it’s limited to a specific business unit or process. It can also help to reassure management and stakeholders that your planning team has carefully considered the well-being of both the company and the people who work there.
As you describe the goals of your plan, consider explaining:
- Why the plan is needed
- Which systems, divisions and units it covers
- How exactly it will aid in disaster recovery
- Who created it and how often it is updated
Offering a straightforward assessment of your goals can also help stakeholders understand why greater financial investment in business continuity and disaster recovery measures is necessary.
Risk Assessment & Impact
When you speak about a “disaster” in vague terms, it might sound ominous, but it is too vague to create a sense of genuine urgency or concern. Unless you specifically define the disasters that could occur – and their true impact on the business – then people are unlikely to take the possibility seriously.
Depending on the location, nature and structure of your manufacturing business, there are many disasters that could arise. Above, we highlighted some broad categories of disruptions, but here are a few specific examples that manufacturers might face:
- Unexpected supply-chain disruptions, shortages and failures
- Equipment breakdown with unavailability of parts or repair
- Loss of all computers, servers and data due to ransomware
- Accidental or malicious deletion of critical data for CRM or other operations
It’s important to identify which threats your business might face and offer details as to how your response to each one would differ.
- Tip: This risk assessment might overlap with content in your other continuity planning documentation. Jump below to see the differences between a DRP vs. BCP, and a link to our business continuity plan template for manufacturing.
Personnel
Personnel is a key component of your recovery plan. Identify the roles and responsibilities of key personnel during and after a disaster. This includes stakeholders, executives and employees.
To ensure that you can resume normal business operations as quickly as possible, develop a disaster recovery team and identify the members in your plan. This team will offer guidance and direct important decision-making processes. Appoint a team leader who thoroughly understands every aspect of your company’s disaster recovery. Depending on the size of your business, it may also be helpful to select a leader for different divisions or departments within your organization.
Including this information in the form of an organizational chart can make it clearer and more digestible for your employees. This allows everyone within your business to quickly identify who is in charge of each recovery process.
Recovery Procedures
For each potential disaster outlined in your risk assessment, you should define clear procedures for recovery. Include step-by-step instructions for evaluating the incident, determining the appropriate response and identifying which personnel will play a role.
A well-defined set of procedures ensures a coordinated, efficient response that minimizes downtime and financial impact.
For each specific disaster scenario, your recovery procedure should include:
- Activation Triggers and Immediate Response: Clear criteria for activating the plan and the initial steps focused on life safety, site security, and emergency communications.
- Roles and Responsibilities: A clearly defined Recovery Team with assigned roles (e.g., Incident Commander, Operations Lead, Supply Chain Coordinator) to ensure accountability.
- Damage Assessment Process: A checklist for evaluating the impact on critical assets, including production equipment, the facility, inventory (raw materials, WIP, finished goods), and IT systems.
- Step-by-Step Restoration Plan: A prioritized sequence of actions for repairing or replacing equipment, restoring utilities, coordinating with suppliers and customers, and systematically bringing production lines back online.
- Return to Normal Operations: A process for formally concluding the recovery effort, transitioning back to standard management, and conducting a post-incident review to capture lessons learned.
Medical Response
In the event that a disaster does occur, the safety and health of your employees should be a primary concern. As you craft your plan, consider how you would respond to injuries, some of which might be life-threatening.
While nearly every business has, or should have, a basic first aid kit on hand, it could prove woefully insufficient in the face of a disaster. Important questions to address regarding your business’s medical response include:
- How much and what kind of care can be provided on-site?
- Who will be responsible for providing urgent care?
- What kind of training should be provided in preparation for a potential disaster?
- How will you obtain and where will you store emergency medical supplies?
- Where can injured staff be sheltered and receive care until emergency services arrive?
Having a strong plan for employee care and safety helps prevent panic in the event of a disaster. It also demonstrates to employees that you value them and are dedicated to keeping them safe.
Contingency Locations
Certain disasters have such a significant impact that a manufacturing company might need to find a temporary site to operate, or, at the very least, keep essential data secure. Your disaster recovery plan should include information about where you could resume operations and how long it would take to get running.
In addition to other operational procedures, your plan should specifically identify whether you have any contingency locations for IT departments and data centers. You can divide these sites into three classifications:
- Hot sites are fully functional data centers with the necessary equipment, personnel and data for a business to operate.
- Warm sites are also functional data centers, but they only have access to critical systems and do not have current customer data.
- Cold sites are used only for system or data backups and offer no operational functionality.
While it may not be possible for your business to resume production immediately following a disaster, ideally your data center would not experience any extended downtime. This is particularly important because data center operations ensure access to your business-critical data (and are typically also vital for compliance with privacy and data regulations).
IT Business Continuity
In addition to natural disasters, cybercrime has become an alarming risk to businesses. Experts project that the worldwide cost of cybercrime will exceed $23 trillion by 2027 (up from $8.4 trillion in 2022).
This risk must be considered when developing your disaster recovery plan. Consider the example of Norsk Hydro, a global aluminum producer that was crippled by a ransomware attack in 2019. Despite efforts to contain the damage, the attack ultimately cost the company approximately $75 million.
Within this section of your plan, you should describe the backup processes that you have implemented for your systems and data, as well as what technology is needed to restore data and networks to full functionality in the shortest possible timeframe. Remember: cyberattacks aren’t the only threat to your IT systems. Hardware failure, software failure, server outages and numerous other incidents cause costly disruptions for manufacturers every day.
Data Redundancy
Modern manufacturing businesses process enormous amounts of data, including customer information, credit card numbers and confidential business documents. This data can be put at great risk by a disaster, so it is important to discuss storage, backup and recovery options within your disaster recovery plan.
All business data, but particularly sensitive information, should be kept in multiple locations, such as internal servers and cloud services. This not only helps you resume operations more quickly but also protects you from compliance violations.
If you do not already have a secure system of data backups in place, carefully research the available options and implement the one that is most suited to your needs.
For example, if you operate an SMB, seek out an affordable solution like Datto ALTO which is designed specifically for smaller companies. (Get Datto ALTO pricing here.) For manufacturers with more robust backup and recovery needs, consider the Datto SIRIS, which offers greater storage capacities and more powerful processing. (Request Datto SIRIS pricing.) Both solutions fully integrate hardware, software and cloud into an all-in-one BCDR solution.
No matter which kind of service you choose, you should identify it in your disaster recovery plan and make note of the frequency of data backups and any necessary steps to initiate restoration.
Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective
Recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are two key parameters that should be included within this part of your manufacturing recovery plan. These objectives offer guidelines for how quickly backups (or other systems) should be restored.
- RTO refers to the maximum amount of time that an organization has to recover a system or application without interrupting business operations. This quantifies how much downtime a business can reasonably tolerate. You may have multiple RTOs for various applications and systems within your business.
- RPO is more specific to data backups. It establishes the amount of data that an organization can afford to lose before operations are affected. This data is measured in terms of the age of the most recent backup, such as 1 hour, 6 hours, 1 day and so on.
Determining these metrics in advance of a disaster helps you more properly prepare for data loss and downtime. It also improves your ability to determine how frequently data should be backed up.
Asset Management
Your disaster recovery plan should include a complete list of all of your business’s assets, which might include machinery that is used in production, office furniture, hardware, software and so on. It’s important for this list to be current, so it should be updated regularly.
It is also helpful to separate assets into categories based on their importance and value to the company. You might label them as follows:
- Critical if they are essential to business operations
- Important if they are used frequently but are not imperative to continued operations
- Unimportant if they are used infrequently and have little or no effect on operations
When listing items that are categorized as important or critical, you should consider how they can be replaced so that operations can resume as quickly as possible following a disaster.
Communication
Clear, direct communication is crucial at every level of your business’s interactions. This includes communication with:
- Management
- Customers or clients
- Employees
- Vendors and suppliers
- Regulatory agencies
- Media organizations
Your disaster recovery plan should indicate how you will convey information to each of these groups. For example, you might include a call tree in your plan that specifies which individuals within the company are responsible for notifying others.
In addition, you should consider the possibility that communications will be impeded by the situation on the ground. For that reason, you may want to provide managers or key members of the disaster recovery team with secondary devices to use during emergencies.
Describe, in detail, how important information will be communicated to the workforce. This might include notifications about canceled shifts, new safety precautions or a temporary change in work locations.
While internal communication is the first priority, you should also develop a public relations strategy. Which individuals will be responsible for contacting the media, and what kind of information will they be asked to share?
Your company’s website and social media accounts are excellent forums for disseminating information to the public and your customer base. Sharing information in multiple ways helps ensure that you reach the broadest audience possible. For instance, you might issue a press release, create social media posts and send a message to email subscribers.
No matter what methods of communication you select, they should be fully articulated within your disaster recovery plan. This enables your business to release information in a timely fashion and avoid leaving interested parties in the dark.
Physical Device and Document Storage
Many businesses have a trove of critical information in the form of physical documents or on storage media like DVDs, external hard drives and backup tapes. If you keep all of these materials on-site, a disaster can wipe out data that is fundamental to your business’s ability to function.
To avoid the risk of losing data and needing to take on the time-consuming and tedious process of reproducing paper files, you should store additional copies of all critical documents, including those on storage devices, in a remote location. This information should then be conveyed within your disaster recovery plan so that documents can be easily recovered.
Drills and Evaluations
Even after putting in extensive effort and research to produce a comprehensive disaster recovery plan, there is little assurance that it is effective until it is actually put to the test. You can accomplish this before a disaster by running disaster recovery drills.
A drill allows you to test your plan in a scenario that could realistically occur within your business. It allows you to determine what information could be clarified and whether there are holes or weaknesses.
Keep in mind that disaster recovery plans are not fixed documents because circumstances change over time, both within your company and in the world at large. For this reason, your plan should be updated at least once a year, and you may need to do additional updates if your business undergoes a significant change in structure or management.
Coordinating plan updates with disaster recovery drills is an excellent strategy because it allows you to closely examine any changes that need to be made. These may include expanding particular sections or updating information to reflect changes in personnel.
Finally, indicate who was responsible for conducting drills and evaluating and updating the plan. In addition, explain when the next evaluation will be conducted.
Plan Review & Update Schedule
This section of your DRP should outline the formal process for keeping the plan current and effective. It should mandate a comprehensive review at least annually, involving key stakeholders from operations, IT, facilities and management. Crucially, it must also define specific triggers for unscheduled reviews, such as the integration of new critical machinery, significant changes in the production line or facility layout, shifts in the primary supply chain, or after any disaster recovery test or actual incident.
The schedule should detail the scope of different review types, from tabletop walkthroughs to functional tests of backup systems and equipment, and establish a clear protocol for documenting, approving and distributing any updates to ensure all personnel are working from the most relevant version of the plan.
DRP vs. Business Continuity Plan Template for Manufacturing
A disaster recovery plan has a slightly different focus than a business continuity plan template for manufacturing, although the goals of each plan often overlap. A DRP typically focuses on procedures for recovering from disasters, whereas a BCP is typically a more comprehensive document outlining all strategies for maintaining operational continuity. For more guidance on developing a BCP, check out our business continuity plan template for manufacturing.
Conclusion
Operational disasters can strike manufacturers at any time, and recent reports show the industry remains a top target for hackers. A detailed recovery plan is critical to your business’s ability to resume operations following a disruption of any kind. Use our manufacturing disaster recovery plan template above as a foundation for documenting effective recovery procedures and systems for your company.
Learn More
Contact our experts at Invenio IT to learn more about the critical data backup and disaster recovery solutions your company needs to avert costly operational disruptions. Schedule a call with one of our data protection specialists, or call us at (646) 395-1170.