Chadwicks Group follows planning and testing blueprint for business continuity success

Business disruptions can happen at any time and for any number of reasons. For Chadwicks Group, the largest building materials retailer in Ireland, comprehensive business continuity planning and testing with DXC Technology proved valuable when the company needed to continue normal operations during a major building renovation that displaced employees for 6 months.

Protecting mission-critical business processes

Having a business continuity plan is especially important for Chadwicks Group’s head office in Dublin, which houses a server farm needed to operate the retailer’s 50-plus stores throughout Ireland.

“If those servers go down, our branch network goes down, and we’re reduced to operating manually,” says Colm Scannell, head of IT, Chadwicks Group. “That results in a major loss of revenue for the business. So, business continuity is mission critical for us.”

Business continuity is at the center of every enterprise’s dynamic ecosystem, and increased demands on data and need for timely delivery make maintaining operations more important than ever. Business continuity planning entails creating a strategy that recognizes the threats and risks a company faces and ensuring that personnel and assets can function during a major disruption or disaster.

Recovery centers serve as alternative locations where, in the case of disruptions, companies can get their businesses back up and operational quickly, efficiently and with minimal downtime.

DXC operates more than 30 recovery centers strategically located throughout the globe and maintains a strong business continuity presence among IT service providers in Ireland. DXC has specialists that plan and test emergency responses, crisis management and business continuity activities, conducting more than 1,000 disaster recovery exercises worldwide every year.

DXC provides Chadwicks Group with two primary services. The first is backup IT servers, storage and network infrastructure that can be deployed quickly in case a disruption occurs. The second is alternative work area recovery sites. DXC’s recovery center in Dublin has more than 1,000 seats permanently configured so that displaced workers have access to desks, chairs, phones and PCs in a work-ready infrastructure.

Tony Logan, DXC continuity services manager based in Ireland, says, “When a customer comes to our recovery center, we have a copy of their standard PC image deployed to all the PCs that are needed for users coming in. All they have to do is turn on the PC and it will connect, and they can work in our facility as if they were working in their own office.”

If a customer needs to come to DXC’s recovery center site, their environment can be restored and up and running as quickly as possible — often in just a few hours — to meet the customer’s specific needs. For example, during a major flood in south side of Dublin, water breached the offices of multiple DXC customers, and its employees were forced out of their workplace.

Some 300 staff from these companies came to the DXC recovery center the next day and were working as normal by 9:30 a.m. “The staff workers were fine,” Logan says. “They quickly discovered they got more work done with us than at their own location.”

Practice makes perfect

Chadwicks Group has engaged with DXC’s business continuity and disaster recovery services for more than a decade to ensure that the right planning is in place and testing is conducted 4 times per year.

Typically, testing is a 3-day exercise that includes setup, script testing and rehearsals. Scannell says testing is very important to Chadwicks Group.

“Each time we do a test, we find something new,” Scannell says. “There are always changes in our environment that need to be replicated in the test environment so you can catch that and find any issues, then make sure your backups are working.”

Although Chadwicks Group has not had to contend with a major natural disaster, the main office in Dublin underwent a major renovation that reached a stage where the work was so noisy it became impossible to continue in the work environment. The renovation occurred prior to COVID-19.

Scannell recalls, “We were able to relocate a large number of our colleagues to the DXC recovery site and they operated normally as if they were at their normal desks. That was a huge advantage for us because it enabled our colleagues to work away without any interruptions and without the interference of the building work.”

Scannell adds that all the planning and testing work that went into ensuring business continuity paid off. “It was a seamless experience for our colleagues, particularly for those who lived near that location — they were almost reluctant to come back to work at the main office,” he says. “That was a very successful use of the DXC facilities and the relationship that we have with them.”

DXC professionals work with customers to develop business continuity services that closely fit their business needs.

“I have always found DXC to be very flexible and accommodating, and customer-focused on what our requirements are,” Scannell adds. “DXC also brings a lot of knowledge to us in terms of how to improve our business continuity. It is quite a proactive service and is bringing a lot of value to us.”