Business Continuity Software: LDRPS 10

For over 20 years, Strohl Systems’ LDRPS® has been the industry standard in continuity planning. In developing the most powerful version to date, we've combined our expertise as BCP software designers with our consulting proficiency to develop an easy to use solution with point and click features most users will be accustomed to. Here are just a few ways how:

The Plan Navigator: Your Planning Partner
Although each plan is unique, the goal of every continuity planner to build a continuity program that helps him or her respond to and recover from issues with minimal impact. The Plan Navigator is designed to assist users in reaching their planning objectives by giving step-by-step instructions on how to build plans.

There are four Plan Navigators offered in LDRPS: Corporate Crisis Management, Business Process Recovery, Application Recovery and Site Event Management. They offer built-in methodology and guidance based on years of research and development, prompting users to enter the most relevant data to complete plans. The Plan Navigators can be used in their standard form or easily customized to suit any personal planning focus or standard.

Master Interface
For administrators, the Master Interface provides the ability to set up plans, control access, manage dictionaries and much more. This administrative interface is seen only by people who have administrative rights to LDRPS ensuring that the access to sensitive areas of your business continuity program are not touched by anyone without proper authority. The Master Interface also enables users to fully customize LDRPS to meet your specific BCP methodology.

Organizing Your Program
Critical details about employees, customers and vendors can add up as you build your plan. You need to know how all this information will come together to show exactly what is needed during a disruption. To address this, LDRPS provides over 200 reports that provide a foundation for the output of your plan. They can be used as is, or customized to change the appearance and content to adapt the output for your particular need.

Powerful...Yet Simple
Continuity planners certainly have a lot on their plates…having difficulty understanding the software they rely on should not be one of them. The interface of LDRPS is smartly laid out and specifically designed to follow the traditional steps taken by planners. Using a basic Windows® format, it uses a tree for navigation and has a consistent look and feel throughout the screens.

How about call lists? In LDRPS, records from any "people" category (employees, vendor reps, and customer reps) can be included in your call lists. Additionally, a person can appear in multiple call lists within a plan and alternates can be assigned for each caller. All of these options are done using an easy-to-use, graphical drag and drop interface.

Many planners face tough auditors and regulators to verify that plans meet certain standards. Being prepared is key. LDRPS makes this process easier with Plan Approval, which enables builders to submit drafts of their plans to selected personnel for review, all while keeping them aware of the review process.

And as with every version of LDRPS, plan management is extremely simple. The relational database, which runs on SQL Server or Oracle, ensures that changes made just once take effect throughout all plans.

Planning Automation
The intelligence built into the architecture of LDRPS is apparent when you consider its many automated features geared specifically towards supporting good planning practices. For instance, since a plan is only as good as its information, one that contains outdated data can’t be very effective. With the LDRPS scheduling feature, you decide how often you’d like your plans to be automatically updated with an import, export or fresh printout.

There are LDRPS e-mail notifications that automatically alert plan builders when certain events take place that impact plans. For instance, a Plan Navigator’s steps may be reset or a plan could be updated with an import or be published.

With the "Prefill From" option, you’re able to prefill from any pick list type field on the Security User Details screen. When a new record is created, the screen automatically inserts the value in the related field on the User Details screen for the person who is currently logged in to LDRPS.

A few other ways LDRPS automates planning is by enabling:

• The assignment of a task owner directly to a task, while subtasks may be assigned individually to team positions, if preferred.
• Several ways to select multiple plans when viewing reports or publishing such as right-clicking on a folder and choosing all plans in the folder.
• Any print job to be cancelled in progress.
• The ability to search on all Text Fields, Pick from List fields and Pick from Table fields in addition to the Text Fields that appear in the Grid.

NotiFind Integration
NotiFind, Strohl’s powerful and dependable emergency notification system which uses many different means of communication to contact employees, vendors or other critical personnel, is able to truly integrate with LDRPS – something that no other product can accomplish. This provides organizations the ability to quickly communicate a consistent message to thousands of people without the need to re-enter plan data into the system.

Why is integration much more effective than a straight import? Because it transfers not only the information, but also the relationships that tie the plan together, making NotiFind as accurate and dependable as your LDRPS plan data.

Information Secure
Access to plan material is determined by system administrators ensuring that only authorized planners can see sensitive data. LDRPS also features Password Complexity, which provides additional intricacy to ensure your organization’s confidential information stays that way. Password length requirements are 8 characters, reinforcing program security.

Complete Planning Vision
The number of factors a continuity plan must account for is staggering. Even the most complete continuity plans can suffer if one process is not properly prioritized, creating a chain effect that can seriously affect your organization’s downtime. But having a visual understanding of how each element in a BCP depends on another greatly reduces the likelihood of leaving important contingencies out of a plan.

LDRPS provides users with the ability to see which Processes, Applications and Hardware rely on others throughout the plan through the unique Dependency Map. This graphic representation makes planners aware of the relationships of these items, making it easy to avoid the chain effect caused by overlapping priorities.

And over-allocation and under-utilization are things of the past. LDRPS makes it easy to compare what resources are available at any alternate site with the requirements of your plan. This ensures that the assets you require are there and that you’re not wasting precious budget dollars on items that are not needed.

For more information on the new direction in planning, contact Strohl Systems at 800-634-2016, +1-610-768-4120 or info@strohlsystems.com.

* Not all features are available in all versions.