to be handled by the senior management throughout the company. The CEO then would decide, based on recommendations from his team, how the company should proceed. The third phase is business continuity. If an accidental explosion occurs at a plant, for example, all operations at the plant are shut down. Sometimes it may be a critical operation to a company, and in some cases it may be the only particular site that has a product or material coming out of the plant to worldwide customers. It is important to know how, in case of a disaster, a business puts its employees back to work, resumes its operations, and keeps the customers happy and the economy thriving, said Azar. At Xerox continuity planning is in the hands of the operations group.

The processes of emergency management need to be formalized and standardized throughout the company. Xerox has their facilities and 60,000 employees worldwide, and even though the managerial level employees speak and understand English, it may be challenging to convey the standards to the entire workforce and to ensure that they are carried out. The approach Xerox used to address the challenges was to get together all of the major players from the worldwide facilities and to review the standards in a simple fashion so that the requirements are understood.

Putting the policy in practice, however, is not always easy, noted Azar. In 1999, Xerox started considering what it would do if they lost a site that produced a critical product and it was a sole site of production of that particular material.

FIGURE 4.1 Establishing emergency management in industry. SOURCE: Xerox Corporation. Reprinted with permission.