Crisis Management Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

Whitepaper

What is Crisis Management? In today’s mobile and often frenetic business climate, crisis management teams are frequently dispersed and face many distractions and other challenges in the midst of an incident or business disruption. This can result in delays, missed tasks and assignments, and decreased crisis response times. Moreover, many critical events have an unpredictable and cascading impact on broader business considerations, such as customer satisfaction, employee morale, brand reputation and the supply chain, that were not previously accounted for in existing response and continuity plans.

Everbridge Crisis Management addresses these challenges by centralizing response plans, activities, and resources through a common operating picture and accompanying mobile application. Fully integrated with the Everbridge Critical Event Management Platform, Crisis Management employs Everbridge’s best-in-class technology for mass notification, incident management and mobile collaboration.

This provides a single platform for all stakeholders— from responders in the field to executives in the board room— to operate and analyze incident response tasks, as well as update and assign new tasks on the fly. This unified view and flexibility helps to mitigate damage and downtime by ensuring normal operations can be restored as quickly as possible.

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

Crisis Management features include: Everbridge Crisis Management addresses these challenges by centralizing response plans, activities, and resources through a common operating picture and accompanying mobile application.

Unified Response & Communication

Crisis Management orchestrates all crisis response activities, teams, resources and communications from a single event page. The application includes operator dashboards, integrated chat, incident log, and smart conferencing, and leverages response plans from existing business continuity and enterprise risk management solutions.

Dynamic Task Management

The Crisis Management Task Manager helps turn static standing operating procedures (SOPs) into actionable tasks that can be assigned to either a function or an individual. Tasks can be added ‘on-the-fly’ in the middle of a crisis for unanticipated situations and scenarios.

Executive View & Reporting

Dedicated event dashboards and reporting allows senior management to monitor response and recovery progress in real-time without having to disrupt the crisis team.

Mobile Response Plans

Crisis Management provides users with a single interface to notify people, mobilize response teams, utilize and execute their existing emergency, disaster recovery and business continuity plans, and collaborate with team members no matter where they are located.

Flexible and Powerful Forms

Crisis Management provides user with advanced form builder and wide range of application such as impact tracker survey, request management and ICS/HICS form capabilities. These forms can be used in emergency, critical events or journaling minor incidents/logs.

Everbridge Crisis Management addresses these challenges by centralizing response plans, activities, and resources through a common operating picture and accompanying mobile application.

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

What value does Crisis Management add to an organization?

• Capturing event details directly into a situation report, instead of manually gathering this information throughout the event

• Launching forms within an event, instead of having a separate tool to gather feedback from the field

• Combining dynamic task lists and having the ability to instantly notify task owners instead of requiring everyone to be in the same location or on the same conference bridge to receive tasks

• Real-time updates, instead of scheduled checkpoints

CRISIS MANAGEMENT REDUCED THEIR INITIAL RESPONSE TIME BY

50% • Leveraging auto-launch to

trigger task lists and send communications

• Creating pre-defined templates in advance

CRISIS MANAGEMENT REDUCED CRITICAL EVENT MANAGEMENT TIME BY UP TO

60%

CRISIS MANAGEMENT REDUCED CRITICAL EVENT MANAGEMENT TIME BY

30% • Capturing event details directly into a situation report, instead of

manually gathering this information throughout the event

• Receiving real-time feedback within forms within an event, instead of making manual phone calls and/or sending emails requesting information from the field

• Having the ability instantly notify task owners, changing task owners instead of requiring everyone to be in the same location or on the same conference bridge to receive tasks

• Real-time task updates, instead of scheduled checkpoints

• Dashboard views to communicate to different stakeholder groups; this saves time by simply sharing charts and dashboards

• Combined workflow with Incident Communications saves significant time

For customers who did not have a solution in place prior to acquiring Crisis Management, on average:

For customers who previously had an event management solution other than Crisis Management, then acquired Crisis Management, on average:

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

When is Crisis Management used? Crisis Management unifies your business continuity, disaster recovery and emergency communication processes to accelerate response times for both large and small disruptions, including:

• Adverse weather

• Natural disasters

• Critical infrastructure failure

• Reputation incident

• Supply chain disruption

• Health & safety incident

• Interruption to utility supply / power outage

• Civil unrest

• Product recall

Let’s take a closer look at a specific use case. Imagine a Category 3 hurricane is bearing down on Wilmington, North Carolina, and workers at all retail locations need to be evacuated and the retail stores need to be shut down.

MAINTAIN COMMAND AND CONTROL 01 Quickly launch the right response plan

• Crisis Coordinator launches the “Hurricane” Critical Event Template with task lists, incident communications, and documents

02 Ensure responders know what to do:

• All responders and stakeholders are notified of the tasks they need to complete

• Team members can add comments and photos for more context

03 Communicate effectively

• The Crisis Management team identifies which locations must be closed and sends a notification to request approval

• Notifications can also include conference calls as well as chat

04 Easily address situational changes

• In the aftermath of the hurricane several locations are flooded and need additional resources from facilities to assess and address damage.

• Responders can share photos and collaborate using task lists, dashboards, and chat capabilities

05 Keep stakeholders informed

• Customizable dashboards facilitate executive updates

• All activity is logged and available in real time

• Publish details leveraging the built-in situation reports

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

How is Crisis Management used before, during, and after a crisis? Many organizations are tempted to take a do-it-yourself approach to their crisis management response plans, using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or other software, but this approach is extremely limited, time consuming, and riddled with procedural gaps. Below is a breakdown of how Crisis Management is used before, during, and after any crisis, as opposed to a DIY approach.

How Crisis Management Is Used

DIY APPROACH CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Before a Crisis

• Lack standardize communication templates

• Long, disorganized manuals in binders

• Limited or no simulated exercises

• No drills except evacuations

• Incident specific communication templates

• Digitized plans

• Table-top exercises and tests

• Specific drills

During a Crisis

• Unsure messages are reaching employees, executives, and stakeholders

• Human stress introduces natural errors

• Lack of centralized command structure

• Poor access to information and useful task lists

• Message confirmation ensuring successful and timely delivery

• Gathering and collecting essential information using surveys

• Providing timely & meaningful status updates using impact tracking and dashboards

• Checklists at your fingertips

After a Crisis

• No meaningful improvement as everything is manual or quasi-manual

• Lack of analytics and dashboards Gaps

• After-action analytics, dashboards, and reports

• Completing necessary forms (FEMA/OSHA)

• Auditing

Who within an organization uses Crisis Management?

Emergency response, business continuity, security, and resiliency teams use Crisis Management to create and launch response plans, add tasks on the fly, and collaborate with all stakeholders, no matter their location, to quickly restore operations, mitigate brand and financial impacts, and help ensure employee safety.

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

Key people within an organization who benefit from crisis management include:

Chief Security Officer, Managers, & Team: Responsible for overall corporate security including physical security as well as safety of employees.

• Crisis Management helps with: “Keeping executives informed during a critical event has been a challenge for me. Collecting status updates from response team members is burdensome and resource-intensive. During our last critical event, we were unable to share current status with key stakeholders nor have a log of events for an After-Action report. I’ve already been told our current process is unacceptable.”

Chief Risk Officer, GSOC Managers, & Team: Responsible for protecting the organization against risks to operations, people, brand, and protecting shareholder value.

• Crisis Management helps with: “After a storm, I need to generate necessary reimbursement forms for regulatory compliance quickly. I dread the time-consuming manual data entry.”

VP of Business Continuity, Managers, & Team: Responsible for ensuring an organization doesn’t experience major disruption to business operations.

• Crisis Management helps with: “Assessing the status of our stores as soon as possible after a storm is what keeps me up at night. It took us days to understand the true impact of the storm on our organization the last time we were hit by a hurricane and senior management wants to know store status quicker next.”

VP of Human Resources, Managers, & Team: Responsible for developing and implementing the organization’s crisis management and emergency response plans.

• Crisis Management helps with: “I am worried how I will be able to bring my employees safely back to the office and monitor workplace readiness during this pandemic. The safety of our employees is my responsibility and I need to show senior management we have proper procedures in place.”

Chief Information Security Officer & IT Team: Responsible for an organization’s information and data security.

• Crisis Management helps with: “I need a way to orchestrate communication and collaboration in a coordinated fashion to ensure compliance.”

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

Where is Crisis Management Used?

5,000 customers around the world in business, healthcare, and local to national governments

With more than

Everbridge is dedicated to the success of our customers and enjoy greater than a 95% customer retention rate across its solutions

95%

CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT

In Miramar, Florida, Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits launched its new state-of-the-art Crisis Management Center which serves as the centralized location responsible for all aspects of incident management for the entire enterprise.

“Everbridge is an important tool in our overarching crisis response program, used throughout our organization to help ensure the safety of our 21,000-plus employees and the operational resiliency of our facilities and supply chain across 250 locations nationwide,” said John Liuzzi, the National Director of Business Continuity at Southern Glazer’s, the world’s preeminent distributor of beverage alcohol. “Crisis Management provides us with a proactive and centralized tool to launch, dynamically track and update all tasks, activities, and communications, enabling us with even greater control to mobilize response teams and execute our business continuity plans in the face of a critical event. Everyone on our response team, as well as executive stakeholders, have access to the event dashboard and can watch progress, and add new tasks, in real time. Everbridge is continuing to help us mature our management of a crisis or business disruption like no other solution.”

Crisis Management customers include organizations of all sizes and in many different industries such as: retail, energy, finance, high tech, transportation, and higher education.

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WhitepaperCrisis Management: Seamless orchestration of your entire crisis response lifecycle in a common operating platform

Get in touch to learn about Everbridge, empowering resilience.

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