The Inovis Blog

With the daily grind, it’s often easy to forget how unforgiving Mother Nature can be. Tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcano eruptions, droughts, floods and so on. At least until you turn on the news some nights.

The reality is that in the city of Atlanta last Friday night, we actually caught a break from old Mother Nature. SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament and an NBA game underway, thousands and thousands of people in town for home building and dentistry conferences, and the hotels in and around downtown were absolutely packed. Unfortunately Saturday storms and tornados claimed lives on the outskirt of the metro Atlanta area (my family was huddled in our basement as 2 twisters moved just past us). But the fact that an F2 tornado ripped through the heart of one of largest metropolitan areas in the US, where hundreds of thousands of extra people were camped out, and nobody was killed? AMAZING!?!?! A colleague of mine was attending the NBA game at Philips Arena and didn’t even realize a tornado had passed them by until he got home after the game!

A friend sent me this photo of the funnel forming a short distance from the heart of downtown. This was taken by a man (Shane Durrance, also a professional photographer, so check out his site) from the top of his condo just a few short miles north of downtown. It appeared on 11 Alive News, the local NBC affiliate, as well as the print edition of the Atlanta Journal Constitution) and it just reminds me of how lucky so many of Atlanta residents and our guests really were.

It also got me thinking about how unlucky others are in the face of the brutality that Mother Nature dishes out randomly. And in most cases, emergency responders battle valiantly and tirelessly to assist their neighbors in need, and crews and volunteers work hard to restore basic amenities and clean up the wreckage. But the point is that local, state and federal government agencies have plans in place for when these disasters strike, because in a lot of areas it’s simply a matter of time before they do.

In the business world, Mother Nature’s whims can wreak just as much havoc on supply chains. As technology changes, it’s important to have solid disaster recovery (DR) plans in place and to ensure that the companies that support your supply chain and operate outside your enterprise’s “four walls” have similar DR plans and capabilities in place.

And in some cases, the intelligence and ability to sense demand in response to Mother Nature’s bad days is as vital a part of the recovery and clean up as the people on the ground, (i.e.: rerouting bottled water to a region without drinking water, moving inventory of generators to areas hit by hurricanes, moving chainsaws and chipper shredders to an area hit by a tornado, you get the point). After all, they too need tools in order to be successful on the ground.

Dust off your DR and business continuity plans and make sure you have the tools in place ahead of time in the event you have to react unexpectedly.