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Relocation Planning

An elite Champagne House’s UK distribution office is moving location. The company is small with only five UK based employees, the French Head Office expect the move to take no more than 2 working days. The company takes orders and liaises with the main warehouse to ensure orders are processed within 24 hours.

Key Issues

The date of the move has been set by the landlords and freeholders and is due right in the middle of the pre-Christmas rush. The company can’t afford to miss out on two of the biggest ordering days of the year.  There is no formal (or even informal) Business Continuity Management plan. Control around all the key move issues has been lost to externals (especially the date of the move and when the telecom and computer are due to be back up and running).

The budget for the move was set by Head Office; this meant that an inexperienced company of movers has been hired.

Incident outcome

• Orders were lost, including one for a large supermarket chain who then changed champagne suppliers
• French Head Office were unhappy with the delay in getting office processes back up and running, leading to a loss of face for the UK Head of Operation
• Ten cases of vintage champagne from the office stock were damaged in transit, at a cost to the bottom line of almost £8k (more than was spent on the entire move)
• The computer system crashed and the back up tapes were 3 days old (the reason given was “we never use the back up tapes and it takes so long to do them that we only do them every 3 days”)

Lessons learnt

• A formal plan would have meant that many of the issues could have been predicted and a procedure set up to deal with them.
• A simple business impact analysis would have helped prioritise actions during the move and would have highlighted the irregularity of the back up procedures.
• Small scale savings gained by using a cheap removal firm were not worth it.
• Working with Head Office to set realistic expectations would have been helpful.
• Overall cost of move including loss of a key account, damage to reputation with customers and Head Office and damage to stock - over a year this was estimated to be 10% of the company's UK revenue!