Fostering Business Continuity at Loomis
Learn how Loomis uses Everbridge to communicate response and resiliency activities internally.
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Loomis US Loomis US is the largest integrated cash distribution network in the United States—with nearly 200 locations, 10,000+ employees, and 3,000+ vehicles. The company provides armored truck and cash- handling products and services to financial institutions and commercial/retail businesses nationwide, as well as globally, with a presence in 14 countries.
“Loomis uses Everbridge to communicate response and resiliency activities internally, but also to effectively alert customers during all types of regional and local emergencies, informing them of their continuity efforts designed to keep the business running.”
Randy Sheltra SVP Risk Management, Loomis US
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Challenges With an extensive employee base, transportation and field service operations, and a significant number of financial banking institutions as customers, it’s imperative that Loomis has a strong business continuity program to support the resiliency of their operations. The organization required an incident notification solution to coordinate activities between internal response team members, while also communicating externally with customers to alert them of Loomis’ efforts to overcome issues that may impact routes and cause service delays.
Solutions After a significant vetting process of critical communications providers, Loomis made the decision to deploy Everbridge to support their business continuity and resiliency efforts. The organization recognized the strength and resiliency of the Everbridge platform, as well as the company’s pedigree in supporting the business continuity programs of financial service organizations.
Loomis uses Everbridge to communicate response and resiliency activities internally, but also to effectively alert customers during all types of regional and local emergencies, informing them of their continuity efforts designed to keep the business running.
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Q&A with Randy Sheltra SVP Risk Management, Loomis US
Tell us about your role at Loomis
As VP of Safety, there are a few things under the belt, including business continuity planning. But broadly, the responsibilities include regulatory compliance, DOT, OSHA, safety relating to driving, and injury mitigation strategies for employees. Responsibilities also include workplace violence, and safety related to our facilities.
How and why did you make the decisions to deploy Everbridge?
Because of the nature of what we do, and the cash management services we provide to customers, business continuity planning is very critical to Loomis. During a continuity event, when there’s no power, you can’t power ATMs and stores might not be able to open. Customers rely on us to keep their cash available through these difficult times.
That’s why it’s so vital for us to be ready for all types of continuity events. Quite frankly, one of the weaknesses we identified was, if we didn’t have normal communication resources, such as email, how would we communicate with people on a mass basis? And that’s why, after
a big vetting process of the different companies out there, we decided to deploy Everbridge. We actually determined we shared a lot of financial customer services customers with Everbridge, and that helped inform our decision.
Can you explain how Everbridge is used during BCP event?
I’m in charge of the overall business continuity plan for the cooperation, and then each of our 150+ locations have their individual BCP plans specific to their location. A big thing we do is that we try to build redundancies in our processes. We have backup fuel providers. We have power, such as generators. These types of things position you to be ready at all times, because what we found in Hurricane Sandy a few years back, is that sometimes you forget about the necessities or the things that you take for granted in life. And when you don’t have them anymore, you’re in trouble. In addition to fuel and power, one of those contingencies is communications. You can have the best plan in the world, and it looks good and it’s 100 pages long, but if you don’t have the right resources, and the ability to communicate effectively, then your plan is worse nothing.
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Q&A with Randy Sheltra SVP Risk Management, Loomis US
This is where Everbridge comes in?
Yes, Everbridge enables us to deliver customer alerts during BCP events primarily. Through the system, we provide the ability for our customers, primarily financial banking organizations, to sign up and access the specific types of alerts that they want to get. If they want emergency alerts for the whole country, they can get the whole country. If they just want to know about our continuity of operations in the state of Texas, that’s what they’ll get.
One of the good things about Everbridge is that we’re able to just keep these alerts short and simple, and focused on what the facts are. Since we have probably 30 different people who can send alerts, we use a standardized message template, which really helps us to keep the process automated and simple. A typical customer alert will describe the situation, and then detail whether or not we are operational, running behind, or closed. That’s the type of information that our customer needs to know so they can plan their day around our operational schedule.
Everbridge alerts also go directly to our website, so our customers can find that information there as well.
Let’s talk about Hurricane Matthew in 2016 and how Loomis operated during this event and leveraged Everbridge.
For Hurricane Matthew we deployed fuel tanks to Florida and to North Carolina. As it turns out, we needed to use them in Fayetteville, North Carolina. We needed this fuel for our employees. Because if employees can’t fill up their vehicles with gas, then they can’t get to customer sites. We had tanks for diesel and for unleaded to be able to fuel our employee’s cars, plus our company vehicles, so that we could perform the necessary services to get our customers back to some normalcy from this event.
Through it all, we used Everbridge to communicate to area customers. It was critical to our organization that we communicated decisive and actionable emergency information to these customers and Everbridge helped
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Q&A with Randy Sheltra SVP Risk Management, Loomis US
us reach them to ensure their safety and awareness of the most up-to-date emergency information, and the status of our operations and vehicles, throughout the course of the storm.
I can say from a customer standpoint, during Hurricane Matthew, we got accolades about Everbridge. We got accolades on the system as a whole, and its ability to send information, because timely information is key.
And now, let’s discuss the devastation caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in 2017. You have a significant presence in Texas and Florida. Can you tell us how your BCP program was activated and how Everbridge was used during these events?
The 2017 hurricane season was the most active—and most destructive—in more than a decade, producing several major hurricanes and causing an estimated $200 billion in damage.
Two of those storms, Harvey and Irma, brought torrential rain (52 inches total in Houston alone) and devastating winds
to the United States. In the days before, with the imminent threat of catastrophic weather approaching, we implemented our Business Continuity Plan.
With Harvey bearing down on Texas, frequent conferencing leveraging the Everbridge system began between corporate, district, and branch incident command teams to determine needs and to begin the process of putting pre- staging resources in place. Since weather events like Harvey have far-reaching effects outside of the immediately affected area, strategic communication lines must be maintained at all times, not just with local Loomis employees and branches, but with branches and clients across the United States.
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Q&A with Randy Sheltra SVP Risk Management, Loomis US
The Houston branch was set up as a central command center and teams began regular communication with local and national clients to ascertain service needs and/ or expectations pertaining to the weather incident. That information was then prioritized and necessary service arrangements or updates made so that branch personnel were not inundated with individual requests and could instead focus on preparations.
In the Everbridge system, contact lists were updated not only for local Houston employees but for each branch in the Texas district. This information allowed incident command teams to view each employee’s proximity to the branch, calculate travel times, and determine which employees could be safely deployed, as well as those who were likely to be affected by rising floodwaters.
Incident commanders also immediately began updating the Emergency Action Communications system with information from news outlets, storm trackers, and state and local government agencies every few hours. That information was disseminated on the BCP online platform,
which Loomis customers may access to sign up for alerts via SMS text messaging, mobile device, or email.
Harvey made landfall on Friday, August 25. We suspended operations that weekend. The suspension continued through Tuesday, after the worst of the torrential rains had fallen. Throughout the storm, Loomis was in constant communication with both employees and customers. For operational efficiency, we used Everbridge to make twice-daily status updates to keep the customers regularly apprised of service interruption.
Just as Harvey began to dissipate, Hurricane Irma was gaining strength in the Atlantic. Because of Loomis’ well-coordinated communication and preparedness efforts, BCP updates had already been going out simultaneously for both storms.
Florida incident command teams had been operating under standard BCP protocols to prepare for Irma. But they had the added benefit of communicating with incident command teams who had endured a similar weather event in Texas only days before.
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Case StudyFinancial Services
Q&A with Randy Sheltra SVP Risk Management, Loomis US
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Do you also use Everbridge to communicate internally to team members during BCP events?
Yes, we also have certain internal teams that are set up on Everbridge. We also have a BCP committee, so any alert that goes out, they’re getting copied in on it, too.
We also have an operations team, because they need to see alerts from an operational standpoint. We have account managers, who can get alerts and then use those to communicate updates to their customers.
Another employee notification use case is around protests. There’s been a lot of protests of late, and anything that could impact the safety and health of our teammates requires timely and effective communications. That’s the other part of Everbridge that, again, we didn’t have in the past. We were operating under the old system of call trees. We would have the phone numbers for all the employees and when you needed to call them, you would have to pick up and dial the phone for anywhere from 50 to 200 employees. That whole process could take 20, 30 minutes to an hour.
So, having this method now available through Everbridge, we can broadcast on a much broader and faster basis and the whole process takes minutes. But also get the feedback, too, to be able to know that the person has responded and is safe. I would say we basically went from a Pinto to a Cadillac.
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About Everbridge Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG) is a global software company that provides enterprise software applications that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical events in order to Keep People Safe and Organizations Running™.
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