A food manufacturer restores operations in under four hours after an outage

220 staff across two plants, running production scheduling and despatch on systems that had backups nobody had ever restored from. The written recovery plan existed, ran to forty pages, and had been authored by someone who had left.

In food manufacturing an outage is not an inconvenience, it is stock sitting in the wrong place at the wrong temperature.

Tier the systems with the operations team rather than the IT team, because they know what actually stops the line. Production and despatch to Tier 1. Corporate systems to Tier 2. Archives and reporting to Tier 3.

Cloud failover for the top tier, a runbook rewritten so someone other than its author could follow it, and a real restore test in the first quarter.

When a major outage hit, operations were restored in under four hours. No orders were lost and no stock was written off.

The runbook was followed by the site supervisor, not by a specialist, which was the entire point of rewriting it.