The Six Weeks That Proved the Company Had No Plan B

The managing director of a Caribbean logistics and warehousing company had built the business over fifteen years into the primary third-party logistics provider for consumer goods importers across two territories. The company operated from a single port-adjacent facility that combined bonded warehouse storage, break-bulk distribution, and customs clearance services. The facility’s location — directly adjacent to the island’s principal commercial port — was the company’s primary competitive advantage. Goods moved from the port to the warehouse in minutes rather than hours, reducing transit costs and enabling same-day clearance and distribution.

When a Category 2 hurricane struck the island in September, the port facility sustained structural damage to its container handling infrastructure. The port authority announced that the commercial port would operate at approximately forty per cent of normal capacity for an estimated six weeks while repairs were completed. The logistics company’s facility, located in the port’s immediate flood zone, experienced water damage to ground-level storage bays, rendering approximately thirty per cent of its warehouse capacity unusable until remediation was completed.

The managing director’s first instinct was to activate the company’s hurricane response plan. The plan existed — a four-page document prepared three years earlier that covered employee safety procedures, facility securing protocols, and insurance claim procedures. What the plan did not cover was operational continuity: how the company would continue to serve its customers when its primary facility was partially disabled and the port it depended on was operating at reduced capacity.

The six weeks that followed were a masterclass in improvisation and a catalogue of failures that operational resilience planning would have prevented.

The company had no arrangements with alternative warehouse facilities. The managing director spent the first week calling every warehouse operator on the island, competing with dozens of other businesses for the limited available space. He secured temporary capacity at two locations — one forty minutes from the port, the other an hour — at emergency pricing that was approximately three times the company’s normal per-square-foot cost.

The company had no alternative port arrangements. With the primary port at forty per cent capacity, import containers faced delays of five to eight days for discharge. The managing director explored diverting shipments to a secondary port on the other side of the island, but the company had no customs clearance capability, no warehouse arrangements, and no distribution network from that location. Three of the company’s largest clients, unable to accept the delays, arranged temporary direct-to-retailer distribution through a competitor who operated from the secondary port.

The company’s IT systems were hosted on a server in the damaged facility. Although the server itself was undamaged, intermittent power disruptions during the six-week period caused system outages that disrupted inventory tracking, customs documentation, and client invoicing. The company reverted to paper-based tracking for approximately two weeks until a generator was installed and the power supply was stabilised.

The financial impact was severe. Revenue during the six-week period declined by approximately sixty per cent. The emergency warehouse costs consumed the remaining margin on the revenue that was maintained. Two of the three clients who had diverted to the competitor did not return when the port resumed normal operations — the competitor had demonstrated capability, and the clients saw no reason to revert. The total financial impact, including lost revenue, emergency costs, and the permanent loss of two client relationships representing approximately eighteen per cent of annual revenue, was estimated at US$2.6 million.

The managing director’s post-incident reflection was candid: “Our entire business depended on one facility next to one port. We knew this. We had known it for fifteen years. We treated it as our competitive advantage. We never considered that it was also our single point of failure.”

This fictional scenario, while not attributable to any specific Caribbean logistics company, reflects a vulnerability that is common across Caribbean enterprises: the concentration of critical business operations in single locations, single facilities, single systems, and single relationships that become catastrophic single points of failure when disruption occurs.

What Operational Resilience Means

Operational resilience is the ability of an enterprise to continue delivering its critical business services during and after a disruption. It is not the same as business continuity planning, although business continuity is a component of it. Operational resilience is broader: it encompasses the enterprise’s capacity to anticipate disruptions, to prepare for them, to absorb their impact, to adapt its operations during the disruption, and to recover fully afterward.

Anticipation: The resilient enterprise identifies the disruptions that could affect its operations before they occur. This includes both the disruptions that are foreseeable — hurricanes in the Caribbean, supply chain dependencies, technology failures, key person dependencies — and those that are less predictable but plausible: pandemic, civil unrest, regulatory intervention, or the failure of a critical third-party provider. Anticipation is the risk identification process applied specifically to the enterprise’s operational capability.

Preparation: The resilient enterprise prepares for the disruptions it has identified: developing response plans, establishing alternative arrangements, building redundancy into critical processes, maintaining adequate insurance, and testing its preparedness through exercises and simulations. The logistics company’s four-page hurricane plan that covered employee safety but not operational continuity illustrates the gap between having a plan and being prepared.

Absorption: The resilient enterprise can absorb a disruption without immediate catastrophic impact. This requires redundancy — alternative facilities, backup systems, diversified suppliers, cross-trained staff — that enables the enterprise to continue operating, even at reduced capacity, while the disruption is managed. The logistics company had no redundancy: one facility, one port, one set of systems, and no alternatives.

Adaptation: The resilient enterprise can adapt its operations during a disruption, modifying processes, reallocating resources, and implementing workarounds that maintain service delivery even when normal operations are not possible. Adaptation requires both planning (pre-identified alternatives and workarounds) and capability (staff who are trained and empowered to implement them).

Recovery: The resilient enterprise can recover fully from a disruption and return to normal operations within acceptable timeframes. Recovery planning includes the restoration of facilities, systems, and supply chains; the re-engagement of customers who may have sought alternatives during the disruption; and the implementation of lessons learned to improve resilience for future events.

Building Operational Resilience: The Framework

Step 1 — Identify Critical Business Services: The starting point for operational resilience is identifying the business services that the enterprise must continue delivering during a disruption. Not every activity is equally critical. The logistics company’s critical services were customs clearance, bonded storage, and distribution to clients. Support functions — marketing, HR administration, financial reporting — are important but can tolerate longer interruptions. Identifying critical services focuses resilience investment on the operations that matter most to the enterprise’s survival and its customers’ continuity.

Step 2 — Map Dependencies: For each critical service, map the resources it depends on: facilities, technology systems, people, suppliers, utilities, and third-party providers. The mapping reveals the single points of failure that, if disrupted, would prevent the critical service from being delivered. The logistics company’s dependency map would have revealed the concentration risk immediately: one facility, one port, one server, no alternatives for any of them. Dependency mapping is the diagnostic that makes invisible vulnerabilities visible.

Step 3 — Set Impact Tolerances: For each critical service, define the maximum tolerable disruption: how long the service can be unavailable before the impact becomes unacceptable to customers, regulators, or the enterprise’s viability. Impact tolerances translate abstract resilience goals into concrete, measurable standards. If the logistics company had defined that customs clearance must be restored within 48 hours of a disruption, the absence of any alternative clearance capability would have been flagged as an intolerable gap requiring immediate remediation.

Step 4 — Design Resilience Measures: For each single point of failure and each gap between current capability and impact tolerance, design the resilience measures that close the gap. Resilience measures include alternative facilities (pre-identified and pre-contracted), backup technology systems (cloud-based, geographically distributed), supplier diversification (alternative suppliers qualified and maintained), workforce cross-training (critical functions not dependent on single individuals), and communication plans (pre-drafted, pre-approved, ready for activation).

Step 5 — Test Through Scenarios: Resilience plans that have not been tested are assumptions, not plans. Scenario testing — tabletop exercises that walk through a disruption scenario and evaluate the enterprise’s response — reveals gaps in the plan, coordination failures between teams, and unrealistic assumptions about recovery times. Caribbean enterprises should test their resilience against the scenarios most relevant to their operating environment: hurricane disruption, port closure, technology failure, key supplier collapse, and pandemic or public health emergency.

Step 6 — Embed and Improve Continuously: Operational resilience is not a project that ends when the plan is written. It is an ongoing capability that must be maintained, updated, and improved. Plans must be reviewed at least annually and updated when the enterprise’s operations, dependencies, or risk environment change. Scenarios must be tested regularly. Lessons from actual disruptions — both the enterprise’s own and those of its peers — must be incorporated into the resilience framework.

Caribbean-Specific Resilience Challenges

Hurricane and Natural Disaster Preparedness: Every Caribbean enterprise must plan for the disruption caused by hurricanes and other natural disasters. This planning must go beyond facility securing and employee safety to address operational continuity: how will the enterprise serve its customers when the physical infrastructure, the power supply, the telecommunications, and the transportation network are disrupted? The logistics company’s hurricane plan covered securing the facility but not continuing the business.

Port and Infrastructure Concentration: Caribbean economies depend on ports, airports, and road networks that have limited redundancy. An enterprise whose operations depend on a single port, a single highway route, or a single utility provider has a concentration vulnerability that resilience planning must address — either through alternative arrangements or through the pre-planned capability to operate from alternative locations.

Key Person Dependencies: Caribbean enterprises, particularly in the mid-market, frequently have critical operations that depend on single individuals: the finance manager who is the only person who can operate the accounting system, the customs broker who handles all clearance activity, the IT administrator who is the sole person with system credentials. Key person dependency is an operational resilience risk that cross-training, documentation, and succession planning must address.

Telecommunications and Power Vulnerability: Caribbean telecommunications and power infrastructure is vulnerable to weather events, equipment failure, and capacity constraints. Enterprises that depend on continuous connectivity and power for their operations must plan for outages: backup power generation, redundant telecommunications providers, and the ability to operate critical processes manually or offline during utility disruptions.

Small Market Recovery Dynamics: When a disruption affects a Caribbean territory, the competition for recovery resources — alternative facilities, repair contractors, temporary staff, shipping capacity — is intense because the market is small and the resources are limited. The logistics company’s experience of competing with dozens of businesses for limited alternative warehouse space illustrates this dynamic. Enterprises that have pre-arranged alternative resources before a disruption occurs have a decisive advantage over those that compete for resources after the event.

Dawgen Global’s Operational Resilience Advisory

Dawgen Global’s Operational Resilience Advisory helps Caribbean enterprises design, build, and test the operational resilience capability that enables them to absorb disruption without catastrophic impact.

Operational Resilience Assessment: Dawgen Global assesses the enterprise’s current operational resilience: identifying critical business services, mapping dependencies, identifying single points of failure, evaluating existing continuity arrangements, and benchmarking resilience capability against the enterprise’s impact tolerances. The assessment produces a prioritised resilience improvement roadmap.

Business Continuity Plan Development: Dawgen Global develops business continuity plans that go beyond the four-page hurricane response to address operational continuity for every critical service: alternative facilities, backup systems, supplier alternatives, communication plans, and the detailed procedures that enable the enterprise to continue operating during and after a disruption.

Scenario Testing and Exercises: Dawgen Global designs and facilitates scenario testing exercises that evaluate the enterprise’s resilience plans against realistic disruption scenarios. Our exercises involve senior management, operational teams, and key third parties, and produce actionable findings that improve resilience before a real disruption tests it.

Third-Party Resilience Assessment: Dawgen Global assesses the resilience of the enterprise’s critical third-party providers: suppliers, technology providers, outsourced service providers, and infrastructure dependencies. Our assessment identifies the third-party risks that could disrupt the enterprise’s critical services and recommends contractual and operational measures to mitigate them.

Resilience Programme Governance: Dawgen Global establishes the governance structures that sustain operational resilience: resilience steering committees, annual plan reviews, testing calendars, and the integration of resilience into the enterprise’s broader risk management framework described in Article 2.

The Advantage of Being Ready

The fictional logistics company that lost US$2.6 million and two major clients did not fail because the hurricane was unprecedented. Caribbean hurricanes are the most predictable recurring risk in the enterprise’s operating environment. The company failed because it had no Plan B. Its competitive advantage — the port-adjacent location that made it faster and cheaper than competitors — was also its catastrophic vulnerability. When the facility was compromised and the port was reduced, the company had nothing to fall back on.

The competitor that captured two of the logistics company’s clients operated from the secondary port. That competitor had invested in the capability to serve clients from a location that was less commercially optimal in normal conditions but that provided resilience when the primary port was disrupted. The competitor’s resilience — whether by design or by circumstance — became its competitive advantage in the moment that mattered most.

Operational resilience is not merely a defensive capability. It is a competitive advantage. The enterprise that can demonstrate to its customers, its regulators, and its partners that it has the capacity to continue operating through disruption is an enterprise that earns trust, retains relationships, and captures the business that less resilient competitors lose when disruption occurs. In the Caribbean, where disruption is not a question of if but when, resilience is not a luxury. It is a strategic necessity.

Assess Your Operational Resilience

Dawgen Global invites Caribbean enterprises to assess their operational resilience and identify the single points of failure that a disruption would expose.

Request a proposal for Dawgen Global’s Operational Resilience Assessment and Business Continuity Advisory. Email [email protected] or visit www.dawgen.global to begin the conversation.

DAWGEN GLOBAL | Big Firm Capabilities. Caribbean Understanding.

Request a proposal for Dawgen Global’s Operational Resilience Assessment and Business Continuity Advisory.

Email: [email protected]

Web: www.dawgen.global

About Dawgen Global