Quick assessment: Is your critical event management (CEM) system outfitted to provide the fastest, most accurate risk intelligence so you can react quickly, keeping people and business assets safe?
As business gets done on an increasingly global scale and adverse events occur with greater frequency, organizations require more from their CEM systems. They need what we call modern critical event management.
So just how hard-working is modern CEM? There are hundreds of ways your organization could use it. In this post, we’ll look at three. Then we’ll show you how modern critical event management can help you manage the situation — or put another way, how we bring control to chaos.
Reason #1: You can’t afford to let COVID-19 disrupt your operations
Recent data from Yelp says that 60 percent of businesses that have closed due to the coronavirus crisis will remain closed. It’s a stunning indication of the toll the pandemic has taken on business resiliency in a short time.
Consider this scenario:
A global pandemic poses a big threat to a U.S.-based consumer product goods (CPG) company. After learning of the outbreak, the company creates a response team to assess the pandemic’s severity in its areas of operation. With a dozen manufacturing plants throughout North America, they may have to shut down facilities. The response team needs to identify affected areas to carry out capacity planning.
Their main concern: If they have to shut down a facility, how can they mitigate the impact?
AI-powered critical event management cross-references sources to verify their accuracy and alert you to a threat, such as a spike in COVID-19 cases at a particular location, within minutes of detection. The platform also synthesizes the data into visually rich reports that contain actionable intelligence to remediate the disruption. Instead of presenting disparate notifications about discrete aspects of the crisis, the reports cluster only the most relevant intelligence into a single event profile for rapid and informed decision-making.
Reason #2: Mechanical disasters are all too common
About 5,800 train crashes occur each year in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Train crashes and derailments are examples of mechanical disasters, as are plane crashes. And they have the potential to seriously impact your business.
Consider this scenario:
A train derails near the downtown headquarters of a software company. Reports follow of serious impacts on the interstate and a possible chemical spill. The company has customers traveling into the city who may be aboard the train or on the highway. Their response team needs to check on the safety of every customer the company is expecting.
Their main concern: All the noise on social media may make it hard to determine who’s safe and who’s not.
With modern CEM, security analysts get augmented intelligence drawn from a global network of validated data sources, including government, weather and geological services, news and social media. They not only get the most relevant picture of local and global threats but gain the confidence to trigger alerts from primary data sources and broader context from secondary sources. And as new data comes in, the actionable intelligence only improves – a huge advantage when a disaster of any kind threatens your business.
Reason #3: Mother Nature likes to show up unannounced
According to Statista.com, there were 1,637 earthquakes at a magnitude of five or higher worldwide in 2019. Earthquakes, wildfires, tornados, floods…natural disasters can present a huge challenge to your people, places and property.
Consider this scenario:
Early reports of a 5.2 magnitude earthquake emerge from a west coast city where 20 executives of an east coast professional service company are attending a conference. The company has limited resources to monitor events across time zones. Process issues and siloed teams hamper their crisis management and response efforts. As word spreads to the public, fear begins to take hold at the company’s headquarters. Hours go by without a clear understanding of the event’s consequences.
Their main concern: Ensuring they provide duty of care and executive protection for the employees at the conference.
Unlike conventional CEM, modern systems are powered by AI and deliver actionable intelligence to quickly put you in control of crisis response. This type of powerful, versatile CEM platform lets you use risk intelligence to pinpoint critical events 90 percent faster than traditional one-dimensional modeling. And fast, relevant information means you can reach out to employees in the crisis zone with targeted, critical communications capabilities. You can simultaneously mobilize response teams focused on finding and evacuating them with mobile incident response capabilities.
Is modern critical event management right for you?
Companies can’t be too prepared when it comes to adverse events like these, especially when the lives and livelihoods of employees, customers or suppliers are on the line.
Do you have the tools and plans in place to keep your people and facilities safe? Learn how the OnSolve Platform for Critical Event Management™ can make the critical difference for your organization or agency.
