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Jack Hipple Speaks To American Society for Quality about Business Continuity

Tampa, Fla. — December 11, 2006 — Jack Hipple of Elliot Consulting delivered a business continuity planning presentation to the Tampa chapter of the American Society for Quality (ASQ). Entitled "How to Keep the Grinch from Stealing Your Business," Hipple discussed concerns about natural and man-made disasters, as well as potential pandemic threats such as the Asian flu, and how organizations should develop plans for their businesses operations to survive for extended periods of time. His presentation focused on planning for business survivability and not just simple disaster preparedness.

The ASQ is composed quality managers, consultants, and specialists in the quality area from the banking, finance, manufacturing, and construction industries. Hipple’s presentation reviewed two new ways for businesses to look beyond the normal "check-listing" approach to short term disaster preparedness. The first is saboteurial analysis or what Elliot Consulting calls Predictive Failure Analysis. Instead of check-listing, which always leaves out areas of concern until they are accidentally discovered during a crisis, a business asks itself how it may deliberately cause its mission-critical procedures to fail during a time of crisis.

Another suggested approach is for businesses to look at levels of preparedness. Many times, an organization only looks at itself as a stand-alone entity, but it is critical to take into account the customers' and suppliers' business survivability. Suppliers that can't supply and customers that can't buy in a disaster situation can jeopardize the continuity of a business. If the disastrous situation is caused by a major fire, chemical spill, or weather-related incident outside of local geography, the effects could still impact the supply chain. A tornado in the Plains states, or an ice storm in the Pacific Northwest, could be just as devastating to the business as a tropical storm in Florida.

Jack Hipple is a chemical engineer and has degree from Carnegie Mellon University. After a 30-year career in the chemical industry, where he spent significant time in the innovation and creativity area, he became involved with innovation and creativity methods in 1998. His industrial career included responsibility for the Discovery Research program in Dow Chemical’s largest division as well as its corporate chemical engineering research program. During this time, many new commercial products were launched which were outside the existing business focus. Hipple, a nationally recognized expert in innovation and problem solving, has developed a system, which utilizes the TRIZ thinking tools in a "reverse" or saboteurial fashion. This predictive failure analysis is specifically directed at identifying critical failure points and vulnerabilities in systems, processes, emergency plans, and organizational systems. These tools include cause and effect-modeling software that identifies concerns beyond what is possible to achieve with standard industry hazard analysis techniques. This process has been used in the banking industry by the bank of Montreal, the chemical industry by Dow Chemical and BP/Amoco, Kraft Foods, and by several software suppliers to improve software code reliability. A copy of Hipple's presentation is available for download at: www.innovation-triz.com/ASQ.ppt

About Elliot Consulting Services
Elliot Consulting Services (ECS) was founded in 2003 to provide business continuity planning and emergency preparedness services. ECS functions as a third party advocate to help companies create, develop, and implement business continuity plans which are designed to protect their vital business resources and operational processes. ECS will review, audit, and help modify a company’s existing disaster recovery model to ensure that the essential components of the organization will continue to function in the event of an unplanned disruptive incident. The team from Elliot Consulting will also assist with disaster recovery training exercises to test the thoroughness of a company’s preparedness model. At the conclusion of a consulting engagement ECS will award a Certificate of Business Resilience. The ECS consultants are certified business continuity planners and business resiliency specialists with Fortune 500 experience.

Additional information can be found on the company’s website: http://www.elliot-consulting.com.

Contact:
Daisy Leoncio
813-789-6134
dleoncio@elliot-consulting.com

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