What integrated safety and security management capabilities do you need?
Loss prevention is a difficult business – now more than ever with the onslaught of threats to people and property. It certainly doesn’t help when redundant safety and security systems are closed off one from the other.
Luckily, technology innovators in the field have built leading safety and security platforms, eliminating redundancies and improving response efficiency. These platforms provide teams with all the information and tools they need to break down the siloes and effectively manage, incidents, risks, and hazards across the enterprise.
But it’s well worth asking what teams should be looking for when procuring an integrated safety and security platform to effectively manage incidents, risks, and hazards. Here are the three key considerations:
- Protect all assets, physical and human. Security teams know that threats in their space pose grave danger to assets. But assets aren’t just physical. They’re human, as well –hence the need to integrate processes and strategies with Safety teams. To put the need in relief: every year, an estimated 2 million workers report as victims of workplace violence in the U.S. alone, according to the National Safety Council. Some sectors are disproportionately represented, too: retail workers suffered over 2,500 injuries and 127 deaths in just one year; in the financial sector, the numbers were 1,100 injuries and 37 deaths.
That’s why integrated safety and security management software has to make people and physical assets more secure. A leading solution will enable Safety and Security teams to visualize the location of incidents, risks, people, and other assets using fully integrated mapping features; so too will situational awareness dashboards for monitoring operations, facilities, and people.
On the task management front, functionality to quickly dispatch staff to respond to any event also keeps employees and customer safer. The same goes for robust workflows to automate, guide users through, and/or enforce business process through a designed series of tasks or actions with a logical flow, decision point, and outcome. - Assess risks. Control hazards. Maintaining safety and security poses an important operational risk to the organization, as safety and security incidents themselves have massive spillover effects to all segments of the business.
Yet, most security management solutions on the market don’t treat every aspect of security, including risks and hazards. Conversely, safety management solutions often don’t provide much more than just analytics, shortchanging teams when they need to come up with policies, processes, and procedures to control identified hazards. Not just teams, the ability of senior leaders to make informed decision is also undercut, as they’re unable to relate incident data to underlying risks to the organization.
The right integrated safety and security management system should, therefore, enable the cross-listing of hazard information (e.g. people, assets, and risk data) with the resulting incident. This capability lets teams relate incidents, risks, and hazards to their organization’s structures, buildings, sites, equipment, materials, and other assets, giving managers the requisite history and intelligence they need to trigger necessary changes and more easily identify where risk controls failed to achieve desired outcomes.
Further, a flexible, safety and security platform should also conduct facility and event risk and threat assessments, as well as track post-assessment security controls and risk mitigation actions. Risk and control functionality should also enable the recording of any kind of risk or control using flexible types, forms, and fields, as well as provide flexible support for multiple different types of risk matrices and scoring methods. - Efficient incident response. Improved collaboration. Risk management is important. But integrated safety and security technology still needs to account for when safety and security risks become full-blown incidents. How? Incident response and reporting functionality has to be integrated into the same flexible solution.
Indeed, the right integrated solution will also ease the incident management burden on frontline workers (like dispatchers), by enabling planned, controlled, and automated incident response to any situation, no matter the incident. For Security teams, in particular, the technology will also integrate with existing PSIM and SOAR platforms (among other systems). Automatic tasking and dispatching of staff also make incident response more efficient; so too does the ability to assign actions to individual roles manually or automate, according to the incident in question.
Additionally, team collaboration during a response drives efficiency and increases speed. Facilitate better team collaboration during a safety and security incident with in-built communications for email, SMS, broadcasts, alerts, reminders, and app notifications.
Of course, preventing loss takes far more from an integrated safety and security solution. What capabilities, exactly? Download our guide to integrated safety and security management to find out.
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