Last Updated on November 7, 2023 by Hina Rubab
Critical events can impact different aspects of the business. The disconnectivity between people and information can potentially be the blind spot leading simple incidents into a full-blown crisis. How do you prevent and manage a critical event, how are you going to connect with the right people with the right insights? A critical event management plan is where you should start.
For example, during severe weather conditions, IT outages, supply chain disruptions, cyber-attacks, workplace accidents many companies are expected to respond faster and decisively to their critical events. Without an end-to-end Critical event management process, it is nearly impossible to make a good decision when the whole picture is unclear.
As the traditional approaches to CEM have become outdated, business leaders are embracing a more unified, efficient, distributed, automated, and collaborative process to avoid the negative consequences of these events.
For you to effectively manage these events, let us dive into how you can execute Critical Event management.
Table of Contents
Create a Plan
Many organizations are rethinking their plans to deal with critical events. Businesses should develop a comprehensive CEM plan to be effective at the time of crisis. Start with a general plan that covers various types of crises your business may face, differing in scope to map down the appropriate resources and response activities. Business continuity Institute reports that 86% of the organization has emergency plans.
Determine how you will deal with each event, assign relevant tasks to your incident response team members, and who will take the lead. Align your plan according to the event’s severity levels, so it can be activated as quickly as possible. Also, consider adding plans to handle routine emergencies and crisis events.
If your organization operates in remote or multiple locations, ensure the plan enabled is standardized and all departments have situational awareness. In today’s mobile-driven world having digitized plans readily accessible by mobile devices is a crucial key when responding to critical events while out of office.
Build Leadership
In most cases, critical events impact more than one area of your business. Changing the organizational structure allows companies to respond quickly and handle massive incidents. A collaborative effort is an ideal fusion as it maximizes the ability to achieve the goals regardless of the scope, expertise, and fewer data to respond to critical events.
However, the organization should pursue a consolidated approach to alliances among stakeholders, business leaders, and teams. As a result of the combination of expertise, insight, and experience across organizations, we can quickly identify and resolve the root cause of events.
Assess risks and trustworthy sources
With a CEM plan in place, the organization should easily be able to navigate the critical events. One of the biggest concerns is not knowing when the threat develops and then not confidently addressing those critical events. Identify a variety of information that is lacking details and is contradictory.
Develop workflows that help you approach trustful sources backed by decisions based on the contextual feeds in the past. Line up these information sources for all types of risks from simple to complex to better determine the value of your assets and different types of risk it contains.
Identify Critical Assets and Functions
During a crisis, interconnectivity and interdependencies play a vital part. It is essential for businesses to ensure personnel safety and where the critical assets are located. Business assets can include employees, buildings, inventories, supply chain, machinery, land, IT assets, and brand reputation.
Organizations should be able to visualize the conditions, locations of their business assets and beyond immediately. It is important to find the cost of the losses by every minute and determine how much it will cost if these assets are impacted by the crisis.
Prioritize and quantify risk
While it is critical to quantify risks, prioritizing can reduce the impact from those events that differ across the company, nature, harmfulness, and its assets.
Consider the context and determine the risk profile to prioritize risk over threats to the best response to any event. It is often considered an effective approach, to understand the overall timeline and few more variables that won’t impact the business for the next few months.
Locate all Stakeholders
Communicating and locating the stakeholders and assisting employees is the top priority during the crisis. Connect the right people, with the right information at the right time depending on the context around the situation and who can help assess the threat to determine who is impacted.
Automating communication and alerts can save even more time helping organizations to think ahead of time to reduce the impact of the event.
Automate Workflows
With mature processes, organizations can automate many of the previous steps to prevent human error and respond more quickly. Consequently, they can execute CEM plans with a minimum amount of relevant information fed into a CEM system.
Adding elements like checklists can make it even more powerful and dynamic. As events occur, automation ensures that nothing is overlooked. With workflow automation, it is best to start with the most repetitive tasks a team deals with.
Visualize Operational Efficiency
Visualization can help organizations bring a whole picture of information about the situation. It helps minimize confusion, accelerate effective response, and share information on how many people, supplies, office buildings are impacted by the event.
Visualizing a common picture can dramatically speed up the overall response performance. While important people can interpret the right information to make informed decisions without having to waste time.
Analyze Performance
Understanding how the organization has handled those events is just as important as having a plan. With centralized asset tracking, visualizing, and correlating all assets, it’s possible to assess the impact and effectiveness of each event.
By analyzing the data, an organization can review actions to improve its future response. A CEM system can enable you to readily access all the information tracked in different ways to accelerate the response.
Bottom Line
As organizations today are looking for smart ways to formulate processes to deal with a growing range of threats, incident response teams are expected to gather consolidated information quickly. CEM technology gives them the ability to quickly access the latest intelligence while also illustrating the threats to their assets.
When a CEM system is used effectively, it ensures continual improvement in response rate as well as business resiliency. Also, businesses can effortlessly coordinate the appropriate resources based on reliable information, and quickly mitigate critical events.
Looking to build Critical management workflows for your business? Get in touch with our experts to understand how an AI-powered CEM platform can ease your business continuity.
Social Media Blurbs
Explore the step-by-step process on how businesses can execute a CEM process across their organization to prevent threats and efficiently respond to crises. Read now –
Many organizations are rethinking their plans to deal with critical events. Businesses should develop a comprehensive CEM plan to be effective at the time of crisis. Get started –
As the traditional approaches to CEM have become outdated, business leaders are embracing a more unified, efficient, distributed, automated, and collaborative process to avoid the negative consequences. Learn how you can execute CME plans with automation. Link
Apart from that if you want to know about E-Commerce Packaging Solutions for Success then visit our Business category.
