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The world’s leading platform for integrated safety & security management.

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  • Crisis management Crisis Management
  • Emergency Management Emergency Management

Apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises. Built on ISO standards, you can respond faster with better collaboration using plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights, to ensure better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement.

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All the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS and other national standards. Keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.

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  • Safety Management Safety Management
  • Employee Health & Wellbeing Employee Health & Wellbeing
  • Governance Risk & Compliance Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)
  • Asset Management Asset Management
  • Contractor Management Contractor Management
  • Visitor Management Visitor Management
  • Emergency Management Emergency Management

All the tools needed to automate your safety management system in one easy-to-use platform, following ISO standards. Increase efficiency with powerful automation capabilities and provide real time insights to all levels of your business. Configurable notifications, workflows, analytics, and mapping empower your safety personnel to make better decisions wherever they are.

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Maintain a comprehensive view of the wellbeing of your workers, their needs, and the wellbeing initiatives conducted in your organization. Through various assessments, checks, analytics, and resources you can easily manage both the physical and mental wellbeing of personnel across various locations and programs.

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A suite of tools to collect risk data from across your organziation from a range of stakeholders, in real time, and based on ISO standards. Fully customisable, with everything from a simple pre-task assessment though to an organisational risk register, we make it easy to capture risk data and provide the analytics to derive rich insights, to keep your organisation safe and compliant.

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Track all your assets from your vehicle fleet, fixed or mobile plant and equipment though to your critical infrastructure using our range of tools. Plan maintenance ahead of time and by collecting lead indicator data from checklists and assessments on any mobile device, then enable users to update the status of your assets to track utilisation, share documentation and report issues.

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Save time and money by enabling contractors to self-register and progress through a customizable workflow, to check documentation before becoming an approved contractor. Contractors can then be automatically followed up using workflows and notifications to keep their organziation compliant.

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Streamline visitor sign-in using a QR code on a form tailored for your organisation. Visitors can complete inductions, answer questions and acknowledge content then have notifications triggered to their host based on their responses. Once on site, manage visitor cards, broadcast notifications and understand visitor trends to optimise your processes.

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All the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS and other national standards. Keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.

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  • Physical Security Physical Security
  • Cyber Security Cyber Security
  • Visitor Management Visitor Management
  • Critical Infrastructure Protection Critical Infrastructure Protection
  • Emergency Management Emergency Management
  • Governance Risk & Compliance Governance, Risk & Compliance
  • Asset Management Asset Management
  • Contractor Management Contractor Management

Proactively manage all aspects of physical security operations from anywhere, on any device. Based on ISO standards, streamline your operations using workflow automations to guide information capture, enrichment, follow up tasks, and notifications. Validate threats and risks to drive better investment of your resources.

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Manage cyber threats, risks, and treatments based on industry best-practice guidelines and ISO standards. Plan objectives and set targets, manage all elements of standards-compliance, and schedule and record audits and inspections. Manage non-compliances and corrective actions, and drive continual improvement review cycles.

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Streamline visitor sign-in using a QR code on a form tailored for your organisation. Visitors can complete inductions, answer questions and acknowledge content then have notifications triggered to their host based on their responses. Once on site, manage visitor cards, broadcast notifications and understand visitor trends to optimise your processes.

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Consolidate the threat and risk picture across all your assets, easily demonstrate compliance with security obligations, and gain an ‘all threats’ perspective encompassing physical, cyber, personnel and supply chain. Address and manage cyber threats without having to implement costly new ICT systems and drive continuous improvement and review cycles.

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All the information and tools needed to manage any incident effectively through the entire lifecycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, following ISO, ICS and other national standards. Keep your whole team following the same plans, communicating on the same platform, and viewing the same operating picture - from any place or device.

Learn More
Request a Demo

Manage cyber, emergency and security threats, risks, and treatments based on industry best-practice guidelines and ISO standards. Plan objectives and set targets, manage all elements of standards-compliance, and schedule and record audits and inspections. Manage non-compliances and corrective actions and drive continual improvement review cycles.

Learn More
Request a Demo

Track all your assets from your vehicle fleet, fixed or mobile plant and equipment though to your critical infrastructure using our range of tools. Plan maintenance ahead of time and by collecting lead indicator data from checklists and assessments on any mobile device, then enable users to update the status of your assets to track utilization, share documentation and report issues.

Learn More
Request a Demo

Save time and money by enabling contractors to self-register and progress through a customizable workflow, to check documentation before becoming an approved contractor. Contractors can then be automatically followed up using workflows and notifications to keep their organziation compliant.

Learn More
Request a Demo
  • Business Continuity Planning Business Continuity Planning
  • Crisis Management Crisis Management
  • Governance Risk & Compliance Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC)
  • Continuity of Operations Continuity of Operations (COOP)

Follow ISO standard approaches to determine disruption impacts and develop plans & recovery strategies to address risks. Track gaps, dependencies and tests, capture exercises, and manage insurance details. Scale up to any incident and back down to business as usual as quickly as possible and drive continuous improvement.

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Apply best practices to plan for, respond to, and manage critical events and exercises. Built on ISO standards, you can respond faster with better collaboration using plans and playbooks, smart workflows, and real-time dashboards and insights, to ensure better incident response, decision-making, and continuous improvement.

Learn More
Request a Demo

Manage cyber, emergency and security threats, risks, and treatments based on industry best-practice guidelines and ISO standards. Plan objectives and set targets, manage all elements of standards-compliance, and schedule and record audits and inspections. Manage non-compliances and corrective actions and drive continual improvement review cycles.

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Ensure preparedness across your organisation. Conduct business impact assessments and quickly identify essential functions. Assess hazard and threat risks. Identify technology, assets, facilities, and critical personnel. Gather and assemble essential information and documents. Develop, test and maintain your COOP plans. From readiness and preparedness to reconstitution, manage all four phases of the Continuity of Operations Plan to minimize business loss and disruption.

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Guide

10 Steps to an Effective Crisis Management Plan

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The Stages of Crisis: Understanding the Crisis Management Lifecycle

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Understanding ISO 22361 for Crisis Management

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Best Practice Strategies to Maintain Resilience

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NEWS

Technology expert's tips for safety management platforms

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A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding ISO45001

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Whitepaper

Getting Started with Crisis Management Planning

Noggin

Crisis Management Software

Published May 19, 2021

Crisis management planning grows in importance as crises grow in number and intensity

Crisis growth is accelerating at a pace far outstripping that of our collective commitment to crisis management planning. According to the Deloitte study, Stronger, fitter, better: Crisis management for the resilient enterprise, 60 percent of over 500 senior crisis management, business continuity, and risk executives said that their firms face more crises (both in number and intensity) today than they did ten years ago. In addition, 80 percent of those respondents have had to mobilise their crisis management teams at least once in the past two years. And that was before the COVID-19 crisis.

Even then, senior executives appeared to have gotten the message. Nearly 80 percent of business leaders polled in an ODM Group survey said they believed their companies were only a year away from a potential crisis. These results are all proof positive that we are living in unstable times, not just in politics and public health, but also for markets and businesses selling their goods.

Companies can no longer afford to wait for crises to wash up on their shores before getting serious about crisis management planning. For one, the financial toll can be devastating. A cost of downtime survey indicated that a majority of businesses thought that a single hour of downtime could cost them anywhere from USD 51,000 to over USD 1,000,000 – not like a temporary work stoppage is the worst crisis scenario, either.

The evidence is clear: crisis management planning only when critical issues become crises militates against the effectiveness of the crisis management plan and crisis management response effort.

By then, the issue might already be garnering outsized, outside attention on social and/or traditional media channels. Diverse stakeholders will be clamouring for immediate action. Crisis management teams will barely have enough time to revisit old crisis management plans, let alone build new ones from scratch.

Too few companies are serious about crisis management planning

Nevertheless, organisations’ confidence in their ability to respond to crisis far exceeds their level of preparedness. More specifically, 90 percent of organisations are confident in their crisis management capabilities, but only 17 percent of organisations have actually performed the simulation exercises that would suggest they are actually prepared for a crisis, according to Deloitte.

The same holds for specific incident scenarios. Some 70 percent of organisations were confident in their ability to manage a product recall. Yet only 22 percent had performed the appropriate simulations.

When it comes to preparing crisis communications, companies aren’t faring much better. A Nasdaq public relations services study found that a plurality of corporate communicators surveyed said that their company either lacked a crisis communications playbook (48 percent) or were unsure of whether they had one (12 percent).

When looking at the specific crisis management measures organisations should take to prepare communications for crises, the picture only gets worse. A full 60 percent of organisations fail to role-play or were unsure if they did. Fewer than half (48 percent) used a media monitoring platform. And a paltry 24 percent of respondents said that their CEOs and other spokespeople received yearly media training.

Start crisis management planning to get the balance right

The evidence is disturbing. While companies understand the likelihood of crises, they, by in large, haven’t taken crisis management preparations seriously, failing to take the steps and performing the activities they need to before crises strike.

So, what should companies be doing? Here, of course, we enter the realm of crisis management planning. Crisis management planning is about proactively assessing and addressing vulnerabilities to avoid or minimise the impact of crises.

One way to think of crisis management planning (and plans) is as the set of processes that crisis management teams (in coordination with other, relevant business units) put in place before a crisis strikes, to manage the effects.

The plans themselves should deal with a number of contingencies and scenarios, especially those most likely to occur in your line of work (e.g., a data breach at a digital retailer or a bushfire in an at-risk region).

As to what should be in your plan, the typical crisis management plan will incorporate emergency response, crisis communications, as well as the steps crisis management teams should take to trigger an official crisis.

Now, if you’re asking who should be involved in the crisis management planning effort, the short answer is everyone. Your entire staff will have to be involved in crisis response and recovery, so it’s important that they are all prepared and understand the roles they’ll play throughout the crisis management lifecycle.

Of course, some teams will be more involved than others in crisis management planning for certain types of disturbances. But even then, keeping everyone in the firm apprised of how to continue business processes in the event of a crisis is also critically important.

The benefits of crisis management planning

If this all sounds intuitive, the question is why do so few companies adequately plan for crisis?

Unsurprisingly, companies that experience crises become the ones most eager to avoid future crises.

Nearly 90 percent of firms conducted reviews, mostly internal, following a crisis, according to Deloitte. Those post-mortems tended to reveal that the crises, while unforeseen, could have been avoided.

Those findings also dovetail with what we know about crisis management planning, more broadly. In the U.S., for instance, the 11 September 2001 terror attacks proved a pivotal moment for getting companies to start planning for disaster. Before the attacks, only 30 percent of the Fortune 500 had crisis management plans. Two years later, that number had ballooned to 64 percent (Hough and Spillan).

Another common refrain is that you can’t plan for every conceivable crisis. The implication being that you shouldn’t plan at all. That’s simply untrue.

The benefit of crisis management planning is not just that your organisation will be better equipped to effectively respond to specific incidents, but also through the process of crisis management planning, you identify other potential threats and are able to game out the tasks, processes, and crisis management software and communications you’ll need throughout the crisis management lifecycle. What’s more, crisis management planning creates better crisis response outcomes, partly because it tamps down on some of the stress that you’re sure to experience in the midst of an active crisis.

While securing better peace of mind is a crucial (oft-undervalued) benefit of crisis management planning, there are many, many others, including:

  • Mitigate legal exposure
  • Avoid penalties from regulators
  • Keeps cost down
  • Ensure compliance where crisis management planning is mandated
  • Minimise downtime and increase productivity

One of the greatest incentives to plan is to avoid furthering reputational damage. Imagine the reputational damage of being hauled before lawmakers and having to answer for why your company didn’t plan for a likely scenario in your industry.

That’s not idle speculation, either. Already, 70 percent of board members said it took their organisations up to three years to recover reputation following a crisis. Sixteen percent said it took four years or more. And post-crisis, there is an 80 percent chance of a company losing at least twenty percent of its value in any single month, in a given five-year period.

Finally, crisis management planning doesn’t end with plans and playbooks. It’s not unusual for companies to prepare elaborate crisis and emergency plans, only to let them sit on the shelf, untested, collecting dust.

Crisis management training, here, is crucial. Crisis management training not only better prepares your teams for crises, it also exposes some of the flaws in your crisis management planning assumptions in a lower-stakes scenario.

To sum it up, businesses have to start somewhere. The crisis threat is here to stay. It’s no longer sufficient for companies to acknowledge the need for crisis management. Business leaders need also to spearhead the development of robust crisis management planning efforts, before it’s too late.

As part of that effort, don’t neglect to procure crisis management software that digitises the resulting crisis management plan, so it’s ready at hand when a crisis strikes. Not sure what other capabilities you need to look for? Download our Crisis Management Software Buyer’s Guide.

 

Sources: 

Seth Arenstein, PR News. PR News/Nasdaq Survey: Nearly Half of Organizations Shun Crisis Preparation.

Michelle G. Hough and John Spillan, Journal of Business & Economics Research: Crisis Planning: Increasing Effectiveness, Decreasing Discomfort.

Deloitte and Forbes: A crisis of confidence.

Oxford Metrica: Reputation Review 2012.

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