ERP system failures cost UK manufacturers 1.6 million man hours

That's chief among the findings of a report by CA Technologies, which examined 200 organisations in the UK. Dubbed 'Avoidable Cost of Downtime', the study also suggests that employees work at 71% of normal productivity levels when their IT systems are down. Andy Brewerton, senior director of business development at CA Technologies also reports that even when systems are back up and running, but waiting for data recovery, employee productivity remains at only 73%. This is concerning, he says, because the time taken to recover lost data can be nearly as long as the outage itself. With the average organisation reporting 50 staff being affected per outage, and each averaging nine hours downtime and recovery time per year, it quickly adds up. Brewerton believes that much of this downtime, and the associated productivity dip, is avoidable. He suggests that manufacturers can address the problem through "a re-evaluation of their disaster recovery strategy". Says Brewerton: "Although organisations may think the disaster recovery policies they have in place are sufficient, many fail to think about the speed of recovery in the event of an IT outage." And he adds: "The longer it takes for data to be recovered, the less productive the organisation is as a whole and the less competitive they become. With the correct data recovery solution in place, this becomes less of an issue."