ISO/TS 22318 Security and resilience – Business continuity management systems – Guidelines for supply chain continuity

In November 2019, the committee agreed to review the standard, the main objective of which was to ensure the document was up to date in providing guidance to practitioners in the activities needed to protect their organizations from supply chain disruptions.

Gianna Detoni, the project leader responsible for revising ISO/TS 22318, explains:

"This revised technical specification is an important document and forms a principle component of a robust implementation of a Business Continuity Management System. In fact, the continuity of the supply chain has been a real concern for all the practitioners since it is very difficult for organizations to ensure continuity on activities which are not under their direct control. In this technical specification, we hope to assist the organizations by indicating various options to adopt, so to gain a reasonable confidence on its suppliers’ capability to deliver as expected.

This technical specification has been aligned with the requirements of the ISO 22301:2019. It applies to any kind of industry and to suppliers of products, services and resources, both upstream and downstream. Three new appendixes have been added with examples we think will be very useful to practitioners.

The revision was conducted through several virtual meetings with experts from Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, UK and USA from March to November 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic. It was a real challenge due to the different time zones and I would like to thank this incredible team of experts for the hard work and the commitment demonstrated.

I really hope that this revised standard will be helpful to those who buy, manage or are responsible for a product, service or resources that are necessary for the organization to produce and deliver its products or services and will assist them to apply good business continuity management practice in line with established standards.”

ISO/TS 22318:2021 is expected to be published in September.