Meet Our Clients

Wellcome Trust

The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation, which 'exists to improve health by helping great ideas to thrive'. Their funding supports over 14,000 people in more than 70 countries. Wellcome is based in Euston, London and employs over 900 staff.

As part of its resilience framework, it utilises a mature incident management / business continuity process which Andy Cuerel has helped maintain since 2012, both as an employed consultant and since 2017 as ACBC.
The latter has included a business continuity project entailing a re-design of Wellcome's business impact analysis process. A specific of the brief was to ensure that new materials were self-explanatory for departmental owners and hence facilitated remote information capture.

Subsequently, a training and exercising workshop has been undertaken to rehearse Wellcome's Travel Emergency Group (TEG), a bespoke incident team designed to manage incidents affecting colleagues undertaking foreign business assignments. The TEG is a necessary reflection of Wellcome's international outreach, which includes areas of the world subject to political instability and civil unrest.

Also in development, but closer to home is a workshop to examine the protocols of staff invacuation at the Euston head office in the event of an intruder alert or external terrorist threat.

ITV

ACBC was contracted by ITV to provide an incident management exercise for the Workplace Services (WS) team. The key objective of the exercise was to examine the team's response without participation from their departmental head or Director. Accordingly, these colleagues were present but acted as observers only.
The scenario encompassed denial of access to a key ITV site within the Mid-City area of London and required team members to work in small syndicate groups, assessing impacts and agreeing actions and communications appropriate to their roles e.g. Security, Logistics, Front of House etc.
Key learnings from the exercise included: the need for a simple checklist procedure within WS; the importance of prompt senior escalation and a requirement to refresh internal crisis communication protocols across all staff.

Francis Crick Institute

AC Business Continuity is currently working for the Francis Crick Institute, Europe’s largest biomedical research facility, developing their Business Continuity Management System. The Crick’s operation is technically complex, employing 1500 personnel across 90 research laboratories and a wide range of scientific support services. The programme to date has included the development of a bespoke Business Impact Analysis process, a refresh of all continuity/crisis management plans and a suite of training and rehearsal activities to embed new arrangements. A study of external supplier resilience is also ongoing, as is the migration of all volatile continuity data into a proprietary software tool, to enable subsequent maintenance and review.

“As the largest biomedical research institute under one roof in Europe, business continuity was a key concern and always high on the agenda throughout the organisation.  Given the high and complex number of risks to the organisation and the requirement for sophisticated and proportionate business continuity and crisis management plans, we needed an industry expert to deliver these for us. ACBC experience and expertise in this area has been invaluable in delivering solutions that meet all of our requirements”.

David Clark - Head of Security / Operational Lead for business continuity.

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Mavens of London

Mavens of London is a digital research, strategy and marketing agency, headquartered in London with satellite offices across the UK and the Americas. Mavens originally required the implementation of a business continuity management system (BCMS) in a 6-week period to satisfy internal executive demands. Andy Cuerel developed a flexible high level model in keeping with the brief, but which satisfied all senior stakeholders and provided a significant improvement to operational and reputational resilience. Subsequently, Andy has undertaken annual desktop scenario exercises with Mavens' Crisis Management Team, ensuring that procedural arrangements and the ability to use them remain effective and up to date.

Global insurance underwriter

This global provider of insurance and risk management services, required specialist training for its duty manager roster, an out-of-hours function designed to address extraordinary incidents affecting the company's international estate. Andy Cuerel designed and delivered the training, which in turn aided the development of a 'playbook' procedure for the managers concerned.