In any natural or manmade disaster, TI's priorities are to protect our people, assets, revenue and reputation. For more than 20 years, we have employed incident-management practices to reduce the potential impact of unforeseen business- or production-related events and to manage impacts quickly should they occur.
Given the high number of natural disasters in recent years, we have seen a spike in customer inquiries about TI's ability to recover from large-scale disasters. Communications mechanisms are in place to share our approach to business continuity.
For example, we evaluate risks and generate continuity plans to provide immediate and efficient response and recovery of critical business processes. We perform risk assessments at operations worldwide to reduce the impact of crises on internal business processes, supply chains, raw material supplies, logistics and distribution centers. We then develop appropriate response strategies.
TI's Incident Management System (IMS) is the cornerstone of our business continuity program. Based on the National Incident Management System, the IMS enables our company to quickly mitigate events and reduce impacts and production interruptions. Employees trained in incident management are part of a response team that can manage a crisis anywhere in the world. The IMS helps us classify and respond to events based on their severity as well.
In 2008, we had the opportunity to deploy and evaluate our IMS effectiveness during two key two key events: the May earthquake in China's Sichuan province, and Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 hurricane that affected TI's Stafford fabrication plant in Texas that September.
In China, TI quickly assessed impacts to our office locations, which fortunately were not adversely affected. In addition, our ability to transport products to and from the country was not interrupted. Our company had some warning to prepare for Hurricane Ike, which helped keep operations going in the days that followed. We also provided food, gas, ice, shower facilities and other support to employees and suppliers in the area.
