Emergency preparedness management is all about strategic plans put in place to alleviate the damage from emergencies and critical events that may hinder the normal operations of a company or organization.
A critical event refers to a disruptive event that poses serious risk to assets in an organization. These critical event management plans involve plans to safeguard all the assets in an organization – human and property assets.
Some examples of critical events include medical emergencies, fires, chemical spills, damaging weather conditions, building collapse and many other emergencies.
Types of Emergencies
Natural Emergencies
These are emergencies that occur naturally. They are a bit tricky to prepare for because their occurrence isn’t anticipated. They could include natural calamities like floods and tornadoes as well as fires.
Work-Related Emergencies
They are the most common type of critical events. They are simply a result of factors relating to work. They affect employees, clients and other stakeholders in the organization.
Examples of these emergencies include chemical spills, machine failure and gas leaks. The level of sensitivity of these emergencies demands a lot of preparation so the damage to personnel, equipment and organization as a whole is effectively minimized.
Civil Emergencies
These types of emergencies aren’t related to the work-place or nature. They simply are emergencies that come from civil factors. As such, they are rare vis a vis nature related and work-related emergencies. They however are just as severe and need to be handled with just as much caution and seriousness.
Factors that contribute to civil emergencies include strikes, protests, violence or harassment at the workplace.
Critical Event Management Pillars
Risk Intelligence
Risk intelligence involves the collection of data on potential risks. It provides data feeds across weather, protests, social media and the dark web to curate, filter and categorize risk events.
Data is visually organized to easily understand risk event location, type or risk, data source and potential severity. This helps security teams to take faster response to threats to avoid false positives and make better decisions.
Correlation of Assets and Threats
Critical event management software aligns assets to risk events using a dynamic correlation engine that combines static location, expected location and the last known location of assets including personnel.
It can also go a step further by considering time elements to determine what or who is impacted by threats so they can be reached faster and more decisively.
Orchestration of Business Continuity Plans and Incident Management
Automated workflows ensure that even when no one is watching out for threats, the system does it for you. You can automate it all – communications and action plans during a crisis to speed up response and ensure appropriate action is taken for each threat.
Unified Communication and Collaboration
This particular component of a critical event management system allows frontline workers to collaborate and communicate via chat rooms and web conference war rooms and securely share relevant documents.
Data Driven Analytics
Throughout the whole process, metrics are built in to ensure the right action is taken by the right people at the right time. Analytics are also instrumental in understanding how effective actions implemented are and how they can be implemented better in the future.
Why You Need Critical Event Management Software
Emergency Preparedness Management
The first and most obvious reason is emergency preparedness. The sooner your personnel are made aware of a threat, the faster they can react. Speedy responses minimize disruptions, reduce overall damage, and prevent potential injuries or death.
Mass notifications can be delivered across multiple channels so life-saving alerts get to your team as soon as the threat materializes or looms.
Builds Organizational Resilience
Having solid emergency plans in place will enable you as an organization to effectively deal with emergencies as soon as they come up. Effectively dealing with critical events ensures there are minimal disruptions and in the event of a similar emergency, you will already know what to do.
