Building organizational resilience in the face of multiple disruptions

The increasing number of natural and man-made hazards is forcing organizations to build resilience against numerous types of disruptions that threaten continuity of their business processes. This paper presents an integrated business continuity and disaster recovery planning (IBCDRP) model to build organizational resilience that can respond to multiple disruptive incidents, which may occur simultaneously or sequentially. This problem involves multiple objectives and accounts for inherent epistemic uncertainty in input data. A multi-objective mixed-integer robust possibilistic programming model is formulated, which accounts for sensitivity and feasibility robustness. The model aims to plan both internal and external resources with minimal resumption time, restoration time, and loss in the operating level of critical functions by making tradeoffs between required resources for continuity plans, recovery time, and the recovery point. A real case study in a furniture manufacturing company is conducted to demonstrate the performance and applicability of the proposed IBCDRP model. The results confirm the capability of the proposed model to improve organizational resilience. In addition, the proposed model demonstrates the interaction between the organizational resilience and required resources, particularly in respect to the total budget and external resources, which is necessary for developing continuity and recovery strategies.