The world’s leading platform for integrated safety & security 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Emergency Management Software
Published May 19, 2021
Over the last half century, emergencies and disasters have been on the precipitous rise. The task of planning for and responding to these sudden phenomena, of sufficient magnitude to overwhelm the resources of medical facilities, regions, or entire locales and thus require external support, falls under the rubric of emergency preparedness resilience and response.
Emergency preparedness itself encompasses any number of fields, with those responsible for emergency preparedness efforts, such as emergency planning, needing to address the following elements:
The end-result of this emergency preparedness resilience and response effort tends to be the emergence of discrete plans addressing all the considerations above. Those plans get reinforced by continuous evaluation and training, which lead to plan updates that better prioritise the resources needed to address the most severe disasters.
Of course, one might ask: why prepare for a disaster when they are definitionally low-probability events?
In 2018, researchers from the National Institute of Building Sciences released findings claiming that every USD 1 invested in disaster mitigation by three federal agencies saves societies USD 6. In the case of certain disasters, like riverine floods, the savings from preparedness were even larger: a USD 7 to USD 1 benefit for proactive mitigation steps, such as acquiring or demolishing flood-prone buildings.
Furthermore, in recent times, these low-probability events have increased in kind, intensity, and cost.
According to the Ecological Threat Register 2020, the number of natural disasters around the world has increased ten-fold since 1960. The cost associated with these natural disasters has also risen from an estimated USD 50 billion in the 1980s to USD 200 billion per year at the end of the 2010s.
The U.S., alone, experienced ten or more separate billion-dollar disaster events every year from 2015 to 2020. The year 2020 set a new annual record of 22 such events, according to The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
These trends haven’t just affected the U.S., though. The Asia-Pacific region (APAC) recorded nearly 2900 disasters from 1990 to 2019. Australia, with its population in the twenties of millions, has experienced more than 150 disasters over the same time.
For vulnerable locales, disaster preparedness is vital. The products of disaster preparedness efforts provide three very important benefits:
Anticipating disasters and acting in advance of them to reduce risk and limit losses also has a financial benefit for organizations and locales. And that benefit can be quite large.
How then to recoup the benefits of emergency preparedness? The lifecycle of emergency preparedness procedures falls into three broad stages.
They include:
Two of the most prolific response tactics are:
So, what about the risk assessment? A staple of emergency planning, the risk assessment exercise serves to identify disasters (both internal and external events) that could affect the area. The method for performing the assessment consists of inventorying resources (in-region, in-facility, etc.), identifying the facility’s or region's vulnerabilities based on its location and resources, and then generating a list of priorities to address those vulnerabilities.
Here, the risk assessment bears comparison with the business impact analysis (BIA). A business continuity management tool, the BIA offers a process for determining the potential impacts resulting from the interruption of time sensitive or critical business processes (more below).
At the intersection of continuity planning and risk management lies the business impact analysis. A diagnostic of an organization’s entity’s internal dependencies and vulnerabilities, the business impact analysis provides the analytical baseline for developing BCP materials, and battle-readying management systems and processes. In essence, it acts as the dashboard for asset protection and recovery action prioritization, keeping everyone on the same page, should disruption.
A good BIA offers senior leader’s a bird’s eye view of the critical activities that generate the most benefits to the organization (or region), how badly those activities would be impacted by a disruption, as well as insight into the pathways by which impact would possibly take place. It is these interdependencies that the business impact analysis is particularly focused on identifying and quantifying, with the analysis itself serving as a prerequisite for an informed prioritization of resources assets to protect and the relevant recovery actions to initiate in the case of an emergency.
So how do organizations identify these interdependencies, and what’s the best way to quantify the risks inherent in them? Well, the process for developing a BIA often takes the form of workshops or questionnaires.
Such analysis is oriented towards critical indicators that summarize the ‘breaking point’ for an organization’s operations, e.g., the maximum amount of damage an operation can sustain before the business is functionally dead in the water.
This process surfaces recovery requirements that are then used to develop strategies, solutions, and plans for the business’s unique vulnerabilities. For example, if a data center estimates that any data losses of greater than four hours would mean the end of the business, but data backups entail significant costs, the analysis might inform plans for data backups every hour rather than every second.
Risk assessments consider numerous hazards; and for each hazard, planners develop possible scenarios that could unfold depending on timing, magnitude, and location of the hazard.
What assets are at risk from hazards? The biggest asset is people; injuries are usually the first consideration of a risk assessment. Those scenarios that could cause significant injuries are then highlighted to ensure that the appropriate emergency plan is in place. Besides people, physical assets may also be at risk, including buildings/facilities, IT systems, utility systems, important equipment and materials, etc.
Businesses, on the other hand, are likelier to consider the impact an incident might have on its customer relationships, as well as with the surrounding community and other stakeholders, including partners, regulators, the media, etc. Business leaders might limit risk assessments to situations that would negatively affect confidence in products or services. Common hazards include:
Type of hazard |
Examples |
Natural |
Flooding, Dam/Levee Failure, Severe Thunderstorm, Tornado, Windstorm, Hurricanes and Cyclones, Winter Storm, Earthquake, Tsunami, Landslide, Subsidence/Sinkhole, Volcano, Pandemic, Foodborne Illness |
Human |
Workplace Accidents, Entrapment/Rescue, Transportation Accidents, Structural Failure/Collapse, Mechanical Breakdown, Labour Strike, Demonstrations, Civil Disturbance, Bomb Threat, Lost/Separated Person, Child Abduction, Kidnapping/Extortion, Hostage Incident, Workplace Violence, Robbery, Sniper Incident, Terrorism (e.g., Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosives), Arson, Cyber/Information Technology |
Technological |
Loss of Connectivity, Hardware Failure, Lost/Corrupted Data, Application Failure, Utility Outage (e.g., Communications, Electrical Power, Water, Gas, Steam, Heating/Ventilation/Air Conditioning, Pollution Control System, Sewage System), Fire, Explosion, Hazardous Material spill/release, Radiological Accident, Hazmat Incident off-site, Transportation Accidents, Nuclear Power Plant Incident, Natural Gas Leak Supply, Supplier Failure, Transportation Interruption |
The results of the risk assessment flow into an emergency preparedness document. In preparing for natural disasters, the document in question will be a natural disaster preparedness plan, a species of incident action plan (IAP).
The IAP formally documents control objectives (or end-goals in dealing with the natural disaster), objectives for the duration of the operational period, as well as the response strategy as defined by Incident Command (See: ICS).
What else goes in an IAP for natural disaster preparedness? Well, this type of IAP is likely to document general tactics to achieve concrete goals and objectives as specified within the overall strategy, while providing important information on the event and limits of the response. The benefit of the IAP is to facilitate information sharing, specifically the sharing of resource-related information. Other elements to consider in an IAP for a natural disaster include:
Finally, the pace of emergencies and disasters keeps accelerating – almost yearly. As such, emergency and disaster preparedness efforts have never been more important to ensure response readiness, limit loss of property and life, as well as expedite recovery. To recoup the benefits, however, organisations and locales must commit to emergency and disaster preparedness procedures and procure the appropriate emergency management software solutions, like Noggin Emergency.
Digital technology to effect emergency response and recovery should also be considered as part of emergency preparedness and mitigation. Stakeholders, here, should support their preparedness and mitigation activities with purpose-built software with dedicated features for the following uses:
Finally, the pace of emergencies and disasters keeps accelerating – almost yearly. As such, emergency and disaster preparedness efforts have never been more important to ensure response readiness, limit loss of property and life, as well as expedite recovery. To recoup the benefits, however, organisations and locales must commit to emergency and disaster preparedness procedures and procure the appropriate emergency management software solutions, like Noggin Emergency.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT NOGGIN EMERGENCY
Source:
Brennen Puryear ad David M. Gnugnoli, StatPearls: Emergency Preparedness. Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537042/.