A DIGITAL TWIN BASED APPROACH FOR ENSURING BUSINESS CONTINUITY PLAN AND SAFE RETURN TO WORKPLACE

Organizations are struggling to ensure business continuity without compromising on delivery excellence in the face of Covid19 pandemic related uncertainties. The uncertainty exists along multiple dimensions such as virus mutations, infectivity and severity of new mutants, efficacy of vaccines against new mutants, waning of vaccine induced immunity over time, and lockdown/opening-up policies effected by city authorities. Moreover, this uncertainty plays out in a non-uniform manner across nations, states, cities, and even within the cities thus leading to highly heterogeneous evolution of pandemic. While Work From Home (WFH) strategy has served well to meet ever-increasing business demands without compromising on individual health safety, there has been an undeniable reduction in social capital. With Covid19 pandemic showing definite waning trends, organizations are considering the possibility of safe transition from WFH to Work From Office (WFO) or a hybrid mode of operation. An effective strategy needs to score equally well on possibly interfering dimensions such as risk of infection, project delivery, and employee wellness. As large organizations will typically have a large number of offices spread across a geography, the problem of arriving at office-specific strategies becomes non-trivial. Moreover, the strategies need to adapt over time to changes that cannot be deduced upfront. This calls for an approach that is amenable to quick and easy adaptation. Our contribution in this regard is constructing a Digital Twin by leveraging various modelling techniques to realistically represent the above mentioned aspects of interest that can be subjected to what-if scenario analysis. We further demonstrate its efficacy using a case study from a large organization. © 2022 Society for Modeling & Simulation International (SCS)

Collective Knowledge and Experience for Resource-Focused Business Continuity Plans Foundation: Survey on How Home-Visit Nursing Operators in Japan Coped with the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper presents a nationwide survey about how Japanese home-visit nursing stations prepared and coped with the coronavirus disease 2019 COVID-19 pandemic. This study also aimed to provide a practical foundation and guide to develop business continuity plans (BCPs) for home-visit nursing stations and nursing care facilities to cope with pandemics. We applied a resource-focused BCP framework to efficiently collect and summarize knowledge and experiences from many facilities about the responses and countermeasures based on the three fundamental purposes to keep resources: prevent loss, promote increase, and utilize limited resources. We conducted a survey during Japan's third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and analyzed the responses using a qualitative and inductive content analysis method. We could develop categories to summarize various responses and countermeasures in a consistent and comprehensive manner. Based on the analysis results, we proposed six fundamental sub-plans to reorganize resource-focused BCP. The categorization and sub-plans are not special or innovative;however, since they focus only on resources and explain what we need to consider in BCPs in terms of action plans for resources, we expect that it is easier for BCP non-experts to understand the concept and utilize it for developing practical responses and countermeasures. © Fuji Technology Press Ltd.

A Digital Twin Based Approach For Ensuring Business Continuity Plan And Safe Return To Workplace

Organizations are struggling to ensure business continuity without compromising on delivery excellence in the face of Covid19 pandemic related uncertainties. The uncertainty exists along multiple dimensions such as virus mutations, infectivity and severity of new mutants, efficacy of vaccines against new mutants, waning of vaccine induced immunity over time, and lockdown / opening-up policies effected by city authorities. Moreover, this uncertainty plays out in a non-uniform manner across nations, states, cities, and even within the cities thus leading to highly heterogeneous evolution of pandemic. While Work From Home (WFH) strategy has served well to meet ever-increasing business demands without compromising on individual health safety, there has been an undeniable reduction in social capital. With Covid19 pandemic showing definite waning trends, organizations are considering the possibility of safe transition from WFH to Work From Office (WFO) or a hybrid mode of operation. An effective strategy needs to score equally well on possibly interfering dimensions such as risk of infection, project delivery, and employee wellness. As large organizations will typically have a large number of offices spread across a geography, the problem of arriving at office-specific strategies becomes non-trivial. Moreover, the strategies need to adapt over time to changes that cannot be deduced upfront. This calls for an approach that is amenable to quick and easy adaptation. Our contribution in this regard is constructing a Digital Twin by leveraging various modelling techniques to realistically represent the above mentioned aspects of interest that can be subjected to what-if scenario analysis. We further demonstrate its efficacy using a case study from a large organization. © 2022 SCS.

Simulation of Energy Management Considering Remote Work of Office Buildings With Storage Batteries in the Case of Disaster

Nowadays, large-scale natural disasters have frequently occurred at many places. To deal with the interruption of electricity supply due to natural disasters, many companies require to enhance resilience of office buildings. Introducing remote work is one of the ways to control their power demand. However, the existing disaster energy simulation models have not considered in detail how building users use electricity in the case of a grid outage, so the introduction of remote work could not be considered. This study proposes a model in which business damage costs are incurred according to the reduction in the number of employees in the office. In the proposed model, the power demand is broken down by the priority of working in the office. Using the cost model, we construct the simulation method that minimizes the cost of business damage in the case of a disaster by moving to remote work. We apply operational data to our simulation model assuming offices before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and conduct simulations of business continuity for 72 hours in the case of a sudden grid outage. From the results, it was found that the cost of business damage can be suppressed when remote work is regularly introduced during COVID-19. © 2022 IEEJ-IAS.

Business Continuity Management Through Stakeholders Collaboration and Participation

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the pursuit of business continuity efforts in a variety of companies that adapt their theoretical plans to the ever-changing environment of today's society. Business continuity generally increases the resilience of businesses to disruptions, interruptions, or loss of ability to meet their key objectives. Business continuity is therefore important in fulfilling the agreed tasks and outlined strategies. Theoretically, most railway companies have a business continuity plan, however, get hardly ever implemented. The main reason behind that is the fact the railway participation in the transport system, has a very specific role in providing transport services. The continuity of railway activities fulfils a specific task, providing transport services, which is one of the basic functions of the state.The application of participatory continuity can also be used in air transport. © 2021 IEEE.