Risk Management
Risk management basic policy and structure
The Advantest Group will conduct measures to minimize damage should any of the following events occur:
- If damage is caused to buildings or facilities, or if networks and systems stop functioning making it difficult to continue our business operations, or if there is the possibility of this type of situation occurring due to a disaster or accident;
- If there is the danger of one of our executives or employees being killed or injured or their life or physical health is put at risk due to a disaster or accident;
- If there is an occurrence of scandal or incident that has the potential to become a social concern; or,
- If any event other than those described above were to occur that could cause a significant impact on the business of the Group or its affiliates due to a disaster or accident.
Organizational structure for promoting risk management
The Risk Management Group (Group Manager: President) was established in December 2001. If any of the events described above should occur, the Risk Management Group quickly convenes to unify information, conduct an initial evaluation, make adjustments between divisions, and establish recovery plans. This Group continues operations until recovery work is fully completed.
Business Continuity Plan
Advantest Corporation established the following basic policy during fiscal 2007 in preparation for large-scale natural disasters. We have devised our business continuity plan based on this policy.
Business Continuity Plan (BCP) — basic policies
- We will place top priority on ensuring human safety should a major disaster strike.
- We will fulfill our responsibility to our stakeholders by ensuring that any impairment to our operations has a minimal adverse impact on our suppliers and other stakeholders.
- We will regularly engage in disaster preparedness initiatives in coordination with local communities, and work with them in recovery efforts should a disaster strike in the vicinity of our business locations.
In the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, we reassessed our disaster preparedness and response systems, and then in fiscal 2012 accordingly set out to rework our BCP, which was drafted back in fiscal 2007.
We began by pinpointing conceivable threats of disaster in order to better forge scenario-specific response measures. Consequently, the plan now envisages a high likelihood of a major earthquake within the next 30 years, while also assuming an earthquake directly beneath Tokyo metropolitan area, which would deal the greatest blow to the company. Meanwhile, we also updated the BCP to include a potential extreme weather event in the coming years, involving heavy rains and flooding amid overflow of the Tonegawa river, which runs through Gunma and Saitama prefectures nearby four of our facilities — Gunma R&D Center, Saitama R&D Center, Gunma Factory and Gunma Factory 2. Next, in revamping the BCP we added three pillars stipulating concrete measures that accord with the plan's basic policies.
| 1.Ensuring human safety | In addition to performing ongoing disaster preparedness drills and trial runs of company procedures to confirm post-disaster employee safety, our efforts to ensure human safety will also include bringing about improvement to our risk management and business continuity practices, updating criteria specifying when to invoke our employee safety confirmation system, and developing manuals that detail emergency procedures in respective business locations. |
|---|---|
| 2.Fulfilling responsibility for supply | We will keep our supply system operating, even after earthquakes, at our Gunma Factory and Gunma Factory 2 production facilities, and will devise a supply framework that enables production at alternative sites during floods. |
| Moreover, we will create an environment that enables employees to continue performing key tasks from their homes and other alternative locations for a certain time were they to face difficulties reaching respective workplaces should a disaster damage the company’s facilities or public infrastructure. | |
| 3.Contributing to our communities and society | In the event of a flood in the Meiwa-machi area, we will contribute to the community by providing residents a safe haven in the Gunma R&D Center, which has been officially designated as a flood evacuation shelter by the local government. |
Going forward, we will offer employee education and training so that the BCP guidelines become more firmly entrenched, while concurrently taking action to build a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) designed to facilitate regular BCP review and improvement.
