eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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This thesis observes the impacts of business interruptions on business, which is a relatively new area of research. Since the extant theory concentrates mainly on supply chain disruptions the understanding of business interruptions is narrow. Companies suffer increasingly from supply chain disruptions due to just-in-time strategies, globalization and outsourcing, but the risks that threaten companies' business continuity are much more diverse rendering this study to seek answers to fill the gap between practical concerns and current academic research as well as to increase the general understanding of the importance of business continuity.

As risks have soared, companies have become concerned of their business continuity. This study presents the concept of resilience in business context so that the vague understanding of it could be deeper, and applied in the operations to mitigate losses.

The topic is approached by literature research, which aims at collecting the relevant findings about business interruptions. It is followed by a framework, which was created to give a means to evaluate preparedness for risks. As for the empiric methodology, seven theme interviews representing four case companies, and a questionnaire provide the additional material for the research of this topic in practice.

Companies are generally aware of their risks and vulnerabilities, but because the competition is so tough, the resources are so scarce that companies cannot afford costly risk management and resilience methods although they would need them. Therefore, resilience should be targeted to the vulnerabilities so that the resources would be applied optimally. Usually companies cannot invest to all kinds of resilience, so the best use of the money is to find the balance between vulnerability and resilience (Pettit et al. 2010).

Risk management and resilience should be taken seriously because business interruptions can have several adverse long-lasting consequences. Hence, the efforts on risk management are very important, especially when business strategies that reduce working capital and redundancies are applied. However, risk management should be economically viable and justified by calculations (Chopra and Sodhi 2004, and Norrman and Jansson 2004).