In business process outsourcing, a business continuity plan (BCP) is a documented and regularly tested set of procedures that keeps client work running, or restores it within an agreed timeframe, when a disruption takes a delivery site offline. The underlying discipline is business continuity management, and the reference point is ISO 22301, the international standard that defines business continuity as an organization's capability to continue delivering products and services within acceptable timeframes, at predefined capacity, during a disruption. In a Philippine BPO context, the plan answers one concrete question: if a typhoon, blackout, or fiber cut hits the site handling your accounts tonight, who picks up the work, from where, and how quickly?
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas puts it in regulatory language. In Circular No. 951, its 2017 guidelines on business continuity management, the BSP describes a BCP as a documented plan detailing the orderly and expeditious process of recovery, resumption, and restoration of critical business functions after a disruptive event. That definition is written for banks, but it has become the working definition across the Philippine outsourcing industry because so much BPO work is performed for financial institutions.
