Canterbury's long road back

A month after the second earthquake that devastated Christchurch, the city's businesses are picking up the pieces.

For Greentree's partners and clients there are several priorities: heading the list are paying staff wages, keeping track of money owing, and getting new business through the door.

One of our partners, Endeavour Solutions www.endeavour.co.nz, is based out at Riccarton and its premises escaped major damage. But with communications down and roads gridlocked, Director Tim Ryley faced the dilemma (once all his staff were accounted for and evacuated) of contacting his clients to see how they were faring and what assistance they required.

"We assembled a list of the clients that we felt would have been affected because they were in areas either in the inner city or out to the eastern side of the city, where all the damage was," he says. "We identified, produced a list of those clients and then contacted most of them, but that in itself was difficult because your systems for contacting your clients are based around their business phone numbers mainly, and of course they're either (a) not there or (b) their phones aren't working."

Diligent work with cell phones finally established that most clients' staff were okay, but that their businesses - as expected - were a mess. In several cases their buildings were severely damaged or even destroyed. Some bear the red tags that indicate they may have to be demolished. Six of Endeavour's clients have had to find new premises. One lost all its data and therefore its current position at the time of the quake; it required Endeavour to restore older backups of its software and has since had to do its best to catch up manually.

Many Christchurch businesses were able to resume work fairly promptly; those who were able to access their vital data remotely were the luckiest. It is known that a few whose servers were trapped in damaged buildings (and who shall remain nameless) risked arrest under the emergency laws to enter the city's no-go zone and retrieve their servers - it was either that or face severe hardship.

Among those hit hard was the Christchurch Casino, a Greentree client and one of the city's biggest single employers (more than 500 staff). The casino itself suffered structural damage, and its administration offices in another building are inaccessible inside the disaster cordon. In the days that followed, they needed immediate help from the authorities to secure large amounts of cash and gambling chips that would have been tempting targets for looters. The casino's future is cloudy and as Tim Ryley points out, with so many people depending on it for their livelihoods, it will be "a big issue", no matter what your views are on gambling.

Also severely affected was Ryman Healthcare www.rymanhealthcare.co.nz, a client of Greentree partner Verde Group www.verdegroup.co.nz. Ryman's head office team, comprising about 50 people, was housed in the Clarendon Tower, which remains inaccessible and has been red-carded. Evacuation was especially traumatic; it took several hours because fire escapes had collapsed.

Ryman administers 22 retirement villages around the country (five of them in the Christchurch region) as well as a number of development sites. All have continued to operate normally, the only disruptions for the villages being temporary lack of access to Ryman's network. From a business perspective, everything is working as usual, and the key to this was good backup systems.

With its servers in Clarendon Tower out of action, Ryman activated its backup plan with disaster recovery specialists Plan-b. They provided offices and hardware elsewhere in the city for immediate use, and were also able to set up a duplicate server environment in a matter of hours. Communications were re-routed temporarily through Plan-b's headquarters in Auckland and most data was restored from backup tapes (they lost a couple of days' work which had to be restored manually). Although the new working environment was hugely inconvenient, at least the office was working again. Ryman has since relocated to premises near the airport.

"Because we've been able to access all of our data, we've been able to continue to work, albeit we've had to do some catch-up," says Ryman's CFO, Gordon Macleod. "We've had to work with suppliers and get them to resend us invoices where physically all of our records are back up in the Clarendon Tower." Ryman has decided not to re-establish its own infrastructure, and has signed up with a cloud provider.

Two other Greentree clients, electrical supplies maker and distributor Vynco www.vynco.co.nz, and surveying/engineering firm Eliot Sinclair www.eliotsinclair.co.nz, are now battling to restore themselves to full capacity.

Three of Vynco's four buildings were damaged, and its head office will have to be demolished. The status of the other two remains unclear. Luckily they were outside the cordon and managed to retrieve their servers, which they placed in the care of Computer Concepts Ltd, who uploaded their data and are now running it on a virtualised system. Vynco was back in business quite quickly as a result - which is just as well, as it has a lot of extra business coming in, providing portable power distribution for businesses and emergency services. Vynco has signed a contract with CCL to support their data systems within its own infrastructure. Despite the cost, Vynco's general manager, Simon Vale, says they feel "a lot more comfortable" with the level of protection that provides. Simon feels Vynco was also fortunate in being able to shift some operations to its Auckland warehouse.

Eliot Sinclair is also getting a lot of extra work surveying property damage in the city and over in Lyttelton. Its problems centre around accessing the data contained in its fortunately undamaged server. The company is currently housed in much smaller premises, and telecommunications problems were only just in the process of being sorted when we spoke to Director Mark Allan. They move a lot of data every day, he explained, and at that time they only had about 10 access terminals available. This meant that data entry which would normally be automated via Greentree had to be done manually.

Greentree's other South Island partner, Enabling www.enabling.net, says it doesn't believe any of its clients lost their data, although Service Line Team Leader Philip Morgan says some were "bloody lucky" they didn't, since they couldn't access their workplace and had all their data stored there.

"You need off-site backup for data no matter what, and a reasonable relationship with someone to replace the hardware," he says. "You really need to have a plan in place to do it because there's no point ringing around on the night of the earthquake to find if someone has a spare server.

"Enabling is lucky in that the great bulk of our clients are either national or international, so they're not reliant completely on a Christchurch market," he adds. "Their infrastructure was hit but their greater business perhaps not so much."

However one Enabling client, GirlGuiding NZ, had to quit its head office and was in the difficult process of relocating into alternative premises when accountant Roy de Vries talked to us. Some staff were able to access data remotely, and are now having to catch up manually with a lot of invoices. Some suppliers, luckily, are being supportive and giving leeway in payment of debts.

Compounding this natural disaster was the fact that GirlGuiding NZ is currently conducting its 2011 Biscuit Campaign, which is a vital source of revenue. Biscuits aren't being sold in Christchurch this year until at least April. However, donations via gold coin on biscuit stalls in other parts of New Zealand, and donations or purchases via the GirlGuiding NZ website www.girlguidingnz.org.nz are being sought. Donations will be used to purchase biscuits to give to needy families in Christchurch.

But for Greentree users affected by the disaster, the good news was, once they were reconnected, Greentree proved its resilience. With computers switched on again, Greentree just resumed where it left off when the lights went out.

"The great thing was that once we got the servers up and running, Greentree just carried on working as per usual," says Vynco's Simon Vale. "With the ability to log in remotely, we could use a lot of temporary machines with AirCards and mobile devices, and the ability to actually now do our work anywhere in the country was fantastic - we printed all our packing slips up in Auckland. Previously to that we actually had dedicated machines and didn't have that flexibility, so just the ability to actually work wherever we wanted to, on whatever modules we wanted to, was great."

"Greentree was successfully restored from backup, fully operational and we had no problem with the database at all," says Ryman's Gordon Macleod. "Workflow and cash flow are all under control - the main challenge is getting some prior invoices which are still in the Clarendon re-sent to us. This is where Greentree has good internal controls built into it, to ensure that the same invoice number, for example, can't be entered twice and that sort of thing."

"Greentree handles all our financials: accounts paid & received, inventory, cash management, GL, plus Excel for reporting, and it's all working normally," says GirlGuiding NZ's Roy de Vries. "We did not have any loss of data - what we might have lost was the physical aspect of what was entered and what wasn't, and so we've had to reconcile what has been processed and make sure we've got all the invoices." Greentree will further prove its usefulness, not to say its indispensability, in the months ahead.

"For most companies, paying employees is a priority," says Tim Ryley. "The second priority I've heard people talking about is finding out who owes them money, because cash flow is going to become a real problem for the next few months for a lot of companies.

Getting your bills paid is pretty significant, and I guess probably at the same level is getting your ability to record the transactions that you're then providing. So from a services company's point of view it's ‘how do we then pick up the fees that we need to bill for the work we've got to do straight away?'.

"There are going to be some real cash constraints probably over the next three months in the town; it's going to be interesting on the 20th of April when money is due to be paid, to see what comes in and what doesn't. They need Greentree to get that information; they don't have it anywhere else."

As for lessons learned, it's easy to have hindsight, but many Christchurch businesses will concede they were caught napping, when the September quake should have driven home the need for disaster recovery plans and proper data backup. A couple of Tim Ryley's clients have already signed up for Datasure, a backup system provided for Greentree customers by Verde Group. Others, like Vynco, have moved their data to hosted servers away from their premises. While this can create communications issues (not to mention added costs), as Simon Vale said, it's the peace of mind that counts.

Tim Ryley says he's telling his clients to get that extra level of protection on top of normal tape backups: get the core data off your premises and store it on hosted systems. But the events in the immediate hours after the major shocks also proved the need for some more basic planning on the communications front. As Tim's experience showed, with businesses' phones out of order, contacting clients was very difficult. A list of individual contact numbers outside of the business lines is essential, and someone needs to be designated to hold and maintain it. Evacuating damaged buildings was a troublesome ordeal for some companies as well. Some may well have enquired since then, how long it had been since they had a simple fire drill. And for those whose intact servers were inside inaccessible buildings, enabling remote access may well be a priority.

"A lot of businesses were scrambling to get everything going again," says Tim, "but there wasn't a lot of preparedness before that - there was just ‘what do we do?'. Which is quite interesting when you think that we had a fairly major one in September, but none of us seemed to have really prepared ourselves for anything worse happening."

Some organisations, like GirlGuidingNZ, had a disaster plan which worked on the day.

"We did a roll call when the quake occurred and made sure people were ticked off our register, then wherever they were going to go it was noted accordingly," says Roy de Vries. "We have a contact register with names, addresses and phone numbers [including mobile], so we kept in contact as much as possible."

"I think for people, the most important thing is knowing exactly who you're going to contact immediately, and actually having all their contact details in your mobile phone," says Ryman's Gordon Macleod. "That includes all your team, all your staff, everything - because your mobile phone becomes one of your most critical devices to get things moving straight away. You need to activate disaster recovery plans, and you need all those key contact details ready to go, particularly people's mobile phone numbers so you can send texts and things like that. Texts are very important when there's a very heavy load on the mobile infrastructure, because voice calls often don't get through or don't work."

For Cantabrians, the road ahead is long and rocky. Among the business people we spoke to, most had suffered some sort of property damage. Simon Vale's father, who founded Vynco, was one of half a dozen people associated with the company who lost their homes. Others lost friends and family. Yet their natural can-do spirit is already shining through; they're on their way back.

"We're hanging in there - we've got to," says Simon. "We have no choice. We're responsible for 60-odd staff and we've got to get the business up and running, but there's always some positives to come out of it - we're having a bloody good spring clean [laughs]! There's lots of other opportunities - it's forced some processes to be reviewed and probably will improve us in the long term."

Those sentiments are echoed by Tim Ryley, who's still busy helping his clients get back on their feet.

"Everyone is back, everyone is working. A couple of people have got some domestic challenges with damage, but on that Monday following the quake our message to our clients was, ‘We're here, we're operational, we can help you do whatever you need to do.' And we started doing that."

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