Tag: Business Resiliency

Seeking to quickly build staff monitoring and rescue efforts into daily operations in manufacturing units, leaders are more than enthusiastic to employ critical event management technology. The technology allows them to tap into the power of AI-powered risk analytics and location intelligence that enhance safety and security programs for their employees. In addition to ensuring employee safety and security, the critical event management tool enhances productivity, improves data accuracy as well as reporting to provide cost-effective solutions to manufacturing production, and help achieve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Taking advantage of the leading CEM tool, Zapoj- manufacturing industries can be well equipped to handle risk, ensure safety in the workplace, and build trust for long-term working relationships with their employees.

Enhancing mitigation efficiency with wayfinding

Perhaps, the most significant application of location intelligence is wayfinding- which guides people through to the optimized route to safety instead of making them feel fatigued and lost during evacuation.

Panic and fear are the two most common human behaviors, turning a normal circumstance into a chaotic atmosphere. Being a familiar scenario of a projected vulnerability to employee safety, the absence of a threat mitigation plan can only aggravate the situations for the emergency response team.

From one end to the other- throughout the manufacturing plant are sprawling numerous units, departments, and offices. Critical events that emerge from fire breakout or active shootout could make employee safety efforts hard to manage.

Location intelligence does not only provide real-time threat capability but also helps locate people or staff in danger’s way. Geofencing technology in Zapoj CEM provides a granular level of location proficiency that identifies people at a particular location without the need for spending more time in localizing which could be otherwise focused on accelerating rescue operations.

Combined, the data Zapoj helps harness could enable the emergency response team to derive real-time situation awareness of where and how they can make the most of the resource at an optimal level so that they can optimize the accurate route for evacuation and move their people to safety with ease.

Real-time location tracking is making wayfinding more efficient and effective for different sectors like universities and colleges or big corporate houses to free human resources from taking other responsibilities to guide people to the right destination. The best thing about implementing critical event management is it can harness location intelligence and help people become self-reliant. The application is now becoming a useful tool to improve safety initiatives in manufacturing sectors.

Expediting predictability and relief work for employees with vulnerabilities 

An easy-to-use critical event management platform can easily extend its support for manufacturing leaders to build fast and scalable mitigation efforts in various scenarios.

• Avoid fatal occupational injury from machines 

Employees working on difficult operations with different pieces of machinery may expose themselves to security threats. Stakeholders and their partners can map threats from handling of the heavy machines and equipment by their staff.

Accidents or safety hazards are common factors to impact operational efficiency and employee productivity. Starting from automotive industries, pharmaceutical to food industries- they all process their operations using heavy machinery and equipment. This requires leaders to implement a robust structure of safety efforts that predicts threat patterns and alerts them to avoid the impacts from sharp edges, moving parts, hot surfaces as they cause serious workplace injury for employees including,

• amputations
• burns
• blindness 

The network of IoT sensors built on machinery and equipment provides round-the-clock monitoring on their health status or working conditions. By predicting defects in operational capability or gaining insights into routine maintenance work using risk analytics through Zapoj CEM, leaders can achieve context and situational awareness. The capability helps them identify which particular machine parts or equipment is likely to expose risks to employee safety, accelerating the maintenance work or restricting further use of those machinery parts until they are replaced or repaired.

• Improve response during disasters

Disasters are unrecognizable as to how they can wreak havoc and what would be the post-event situations. From the point of identifying the upcoming critical event threats to the point of allocating resources – that can help optimize disaster preparedness, a robust crisis communication streamlines processes of how leaders can effectively plan collaboratively and build a comprehensive approach to bringing their people to safety.

Natural disasters- earthquakes, hailstorms, floods, hurricanes, cyclones, and many more extreme weather conditions pose threats to the community as well as the people of a particular manufacturing plant or units that are located in the affected area.

These critical events are unavoidable, but Zapoj helps build a better disaster recovery plan, resulting in the reduction of post-event impacts on the operations and facilities, most importantly on people who work at manufacturing sites.

For example, floods or cyclones as they erupt, disrupt transportations, commuting, and life. The high probability of property damage increases the safety risk of people or lone workers.

What would be evolving situations of any critical event are the breakthrough ground for emergency response teams to decide effective efforts to keep their people informed and safe. Getting the ability to get billions of data feeds- real-time weather data, satellite imagery, and many many such data could improve visualization. Revealing upcoming patterns in the situations gives them the right way to make data-enabled decisions, eliminating the scope of making mistakes in recovery efforts.

Zapoj interactive command center is interactive. On the screen, the built-in geospatial map can be overlaid with data and predict how the next few hours could appear- whether it makes the situations even more critical or they would subside. Understanding the situation helps people become more productive and responsive.

Analysis of risk and hazard locations, therefore, speeds up the processes for the emergency response team to manage, prioritize, and mitigate risk and help people remain safe.

Historical data that Zapoj preserves can be used for analysis and decision making, simplifying understanding to build more robust rescue operations and emergency preparedness.

• Prioritize employee health and wellness 

One source of truth, location intelligence is used by leading healthcare institutes to detect the spread of the COVID-19 infections in a particular area or on a global scale.

Zapoj uses this technology to allow digital workflows as and when a mass exposure to infection is detected. An emergency notification escalates to alert people of the vulnerabilities, suggests isolation for those who come in contact with the infection, and processes sanitization of facilities to curb spread in the manufacturing areas. Location technology proves to be effective in maintaining COVID-19 protocols as established by the government or the respective governing body.

Besides this basic disease control effort, Zapoj provides opt-in portals that provide far-reaching employees to register with the HRSM system, allowing them to notify their health status in response to COVID-19 exposure. Based on the updates, leaders can streamline their workforce schedules so that they can maintain operational efficiency without any restrictions.

In pace with the changing patterns of critical events,  Zapoj CEM continues to leverage powerful AI technologies to improve its capabilities at a greater level of speed and efficiency. The enhancement of location technology in combination with risk analytics enables leaders across manufacturing industries to capture data and analyze it, helping them reveal threat pictures in real-time. Zapoj users can build an augmented contextual experience. In an attempt to eliminate safety risks to employees, leaders are two times more likely to improve collaboration and communication, while also preventing vulnerabilities at scale.

Learn more about Zapoj here. If you are planning to leverage CEM technology, schedule a demo for Zapoj.

IT service alignment is imperative to bring manufacturing wide agility and resilience. Delivering real-time IT information helps keep manufacturing processes up and running. Faced with challenges that restrict connectedness between systems, make processes complex, and add to high operational costs, IT service delivery transformation is key.

Manufacturing CIOs or leaders can utilize Zapoj to bring disconnected systems together and enable floor operators, dispersed workforce, and teams to gather necessary information, enabling seamless delivery of services for consumption – with the fluidity of operational efficiency from plants to supply chain.

Additionally, the leaders must take an innovative strategy to maintain IT service operations so that unplanned downtime does not become a growth challenge. However, a large line of IT resources- ranging between core and legacy systems like ERP, CRM, HRSM systems, or other plant assets may malfunction and affect your business operations as well as the bottom line.

Deploying Zapoj critical event management platform to help with data visualization and automate digital workflows is key to mitigating IT system failure and supporting resilience.

Restricting the diversified effects of IT system failure 

During any kind of critical event that affects the continuity of IT services at manufacturing facilities can be termed as an IT incident. More than severe weather conditions, lack of digital innovations or irregular monitoring of manufacturing IT assets allow them to underperform and eventually they stop working in proper order.

More than ever, critical events are becoming critically tough to mitigate as they grow unprecedented and unpredictable. Resilience practitioners or business continuity managers must know IT systems can have impacts from several sources of potential risks- 

• Cyber security threats or data breaches
• Server downtime or power outage
• System or hardware failures 
• Extreme weather events
• Lack of skills 

As part of overall organizational resilience, manufacturing leaders must see IT incidents as critical threats. However, critical event management does not pertain only to weather-related vulnerabilities, it significantly means the disruption of operational efficiency. A dedicated IT service management helps restrict impacts to business processes before letting a critical IT threat become a serious concern and severe challenge.

To prevent an impact of IT system failure or disruption on manufacturing processes, business leaders need to build an effective crisis communication tool to keep staff and stakeholders informed about the ongoing threat to their IT architecture and suggest ways to mitigate potential loss.

Zapoj seamlessly enables leaders to use its built-in two-way communication features and get necessary resources to prevent reputational damage, while continuing the operations across all plants.

The crisis communication tool scales with the growing needs of IT service restoration, which expands its capabilities to allow IT responders to react as automated digital workflows escalate.

Zapoj Cuts Through Noise and Restores Operations

Digital workflows can be triggered automatically based on data that manufacturing leaders can collect to build visualization into vulnerabilities of upcoming IT disruptions.

IoT devices connect IT tools. It gives Zapoj CEM a flexible method to collect data, which is used by business owners to analyze, identify and take appropriate action to prevent future incidents. As part of IT incident management, Zapoj increases efficiency in automating digital workflows- as a result, manufacturing leaders can better manage IT incidents.

Mapping vulnerability

Sensors implanted on IT systems can easily detect if any failure is approaching.

Zapoj harnesses data from the connected devices to analyze and categorize it by a different type of severity segmentation.

Regardless of minor or major IT failure, IT incident alerting escalates to reach the right to communicate and collaborate with the IT recovery team.

To decide how to prepare for incident management, incident classification takes a major role. The categorization focuses on which plant has a malfunction in its ERP system or which department is likely to face server downtime or a falter in the HRSM system. Even a minor glitch can suspend manufacturing services, making productivity fall that impacts profitability and customer satisfaction.

Zapoj provides an efficient way to visualize and contextualize data, which helps with the categorization of incidents. The data can be then set upon a command center to build a common operating picture, offering an accurate representation of the threat.

With a single pane of glass at hand, the IT team can achieve data-driven decisions, which further suggests appropriate procedures to mitigate priority-wise incidents.

Leaders communicate mitigation strategies through automated digital workflows- and as they resolve the issues, they can close the ticket.

Enhancing manufacturing efficiency and productivity 

IT service disruption can no longer be affecting manufacturing operations as leaders leverage the IT incident management platforms. Using machine learning technologies, Zapoj pioneers the best practices and procedures in mitigating IT incidents and delivers better resolutions to address future incidents. Logged-in threat mitigation history in the system clarifies ambiguity and suggests better recovery efforts for dedicated IT agents.

A swift resolution to the IT threat is enabled by getting everyone – the stakeholders, emergency responders to the same platform. A collaborative approach that Zapoj gives to the manufacturing leaders provides a transparent and accurate platform to build a conferencing bridging and improve the level of mitigation efforts.

Employees working at the manufacturing site also have a scalable communication system to notify of the IT incidents to the right IT responder team.  Learning from the historical data and upcoming threat nature helps them select the right approach and minimize the meantime to resolution, thereby eliminating noise, prioritize IT threats, and mitigate them immediately.

Zapoj provides well-documented IT incident management procedures, which are easy to handle for IT responders as well as employees of the organization. Using multi-modal communication capability, employees can interact with the appropriate department for a quick resolution, reducing the length of downtime.

Getting back to normal operations immediately has minimal effects on employee experience that improves their efficiency and productivity. As a result, Zapoj boosts manufacturing performance, increases operational efficiency, and helps maintain profitability.

Trusted by many organizations to increase business productivity, critical event management platforms today become an integral part of their IT infrastructure. As organizations need to keep operations running smoothly and avoid critical IT threats, Zapoj can provide the necessary resources for business continuity and resilience. For more information on how Zapoj helps manufacturing organizations avoid downtime, schedule a demo today.

When looking to build a strong business continuity structure, the most common scenarios manufacturing leaders keep in mind are the impacts of critical events on manufacturing operations and productions.

Manufacturing industries that have dispersed operational plants are having a greater level of challenges. In a plant located at a far-flung location, cyclones may keep the operations shut, while other dispersed branches continue their operations- but with the lagging support from a disrupted plant, supply chain operations collapse and hit customer fulfillment.

Simultaneously, fire means the closure of a manufacturing plant that needs repairs or relocations. More such growing critical event challenges emerge daily. The types of threat may be different by location, with different types of rescue efforts being brought forward for earthquakes in one place and hailstorms in another place.

Visual risk intelligence and location intelligence improves decision-making and builds a better design that encourages business continuity while giving the best ability to mitigate the impacts of critical events at a large scale.

Why do manufacturing leaders focus on business continuity?

It is important organizations of all types should consider business continuity or resilience for operational processes. Identifying or addressing resiliency between every step of the process is crucial in manufacturing industries too.

From securing an IT infrastructure to preventing disruptions to critical equipment and facilities through to providing employee safety and maintaining a healthy supply chain management, they can reduce vulnerabilities to operational efficiency.

If leaders fail to realize the importance of business continuity, they are unable to withstand a variety of threats during critical events, which not only impacts their reliability but also affects their growth.

As per IDC, businesses can have monetary losses of up to $100,000 per hour for an infrastructure failure. Critical application failure costs businesses up to $ 1 million per hour.

Each part of the manufacturing process is integral to each other- which means the failure of each component has a ripple effect on the resiliency and most importantly growth. Rapidly responding to critical events and adapting to their impacts can help manufacturing leaders become resilient.

Zapoj CEM can provide flexible business continuity strategies that manufacturing leaders can utilize to be prepared for unexpected threats and get the ability to detect, respond, and recover from critical event threats.

Achieve a better view into threat recovery

Organizations today look to continue their operations across every significant area. Disaster recovery can only be one side of the resiliency approach, but business continuity provides a holistic advantage to leaders and their future growth scope.

To achieve speed to overall resiliency strategy, recovery efforts should be designed ahead of time – not only when disaster emerges with the trigger of a fire, storm, flood, or other devastative incidents.

The ability to harness historical threat data in respect to the impacts that ensued some time back or a year ago could lead to the discovery of the exact causes of IT system failures or critical equipment failures in some parts of the manufacturing plants. In addition, artificial intelligence that simplifies the identification of threat patterns can reveal missing links in the recovery efforts of a particular time and suggest improved methods to remediate vulnerabilities to operational efficiency.

Zapoj gathers lots of data- from imagery satellite, social media channels, weather feeds, public or private agencies, and multiple sources that interact about the events. This robust CEM platform is a dedicated architecture to preserve data into its database, which gives manufacturing leaders an efficient way to analyze and observe – where the impact was so harsher, how long was the facility disruption, or did their emergency response team manage the threat to their assets with their best capability.

By understanding the conditions and impacts of the critical events, leaders can make an informed decision about how much resources they need to mitigate the threat of facility disruptions or what changes they must make to their contingency plan in response to the identical threat in the future.

With an ability to combine a variety of datasets, Zapoj can perform advanced calculations that help reveal ways to ensure employee safety in various situations during a fire, man-made disaster, or extreme weather conditions.

Respond to threats to manufacturing operational processes

Critical events are becoming more stubborn, frequent, and less predictable. Like every business sector, manufacturing needs to safeguard its people and assets so that the impact of operation disruptions does not linger for indefinite periods.

The winter weather calamities, cyclones or storms and man-made disasters raise challenges to operational continuity. The most common scenario of the impacts of these critical events is facility disruptions due to roof collapses, failed IT systems, or power outages.

To respond to business closures because of the facility disruptions, critical event management-reinforced recovery efforts are the most desirable. The emergency preparedness plan works efficiently and effectively for emergency response teams in different dispersed manufacturing plants before, during, and after the critical events.

Leaders also need to gather real-time data to ensure safety and resilience to their supply chain efficiency.By building a common operating picture, it is easier to achieve situational awareness about where it is facing weather challenges or political unrest. The location data also helps track evolving situations ahead of its route and allows emergency response teams to coordinate better. As a result, the collaborative approach helps optimize resources and manpower efficiently and facilitates operational continuity.

As discussed earlier, using historical data in the Zapoj database, leaders can prioritize incidents that are more likely to occur and impact business operations.  Different types of testing drills can be effective and help manage rescue efforts for them.

It is important to communicate as quickly as possible to collaborate with the right person and facilitate the recovery efforts. Using a mass notification system in Zapoj, they create customized message templates specific to the evolving situations and build contextual awareness for the receivers.

During any critical situation, if employees are in harm’s way, location intelligence gives location accuracy, and reaching out to the right person becomes easier with an up-to-date contact center built upon Zapoj. Emergency responders can escalate messages to the right person to the right location without creating any panic or adding to information fatigue. In safeguarding employees, real-time critical communication plays an important role. The multimodal communication channel keeps everyone informed and protected.

Business continuity in the manufacturing sector is critical to reducing the supply shortage, meeting consumer demand while building strategies to prevent vulnerabilities.

Zapoj harnesses bespoke AI technologies to equip its capabilities to build visual risk intelligence and situational awareness. With the ability to collect data from a global network of tools and technologies and across the manufacturing locations, leaders utilize Zapoj to monitor every step of the manufacturing processes. The real-time visibility into end-to-end operations involving workforce, IT systems, logistics, or supply chain movement provides actionable insights and accuracy into decision-making.

As leaders need to coordinate and collaborate, real-time critical communications improve understanding and therefore keep their emergency people up for mitigating risks and keep their employees protected.

A major part of a business continuity plan depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of tools and techniques that leaders use to handle risks and restore operations.  Zapoj is purpose-built to meet the expectations of emergency response teams to ensure manufacturing resilience.

We know manufacturing resilience is important to future growth and customer satisfaction. Being a manufacturing leader if you are determined to prevent disruptions and support business continuity, leverage Zapoj. Schedule a demo today.

The supply chain is a bridge that connects suppliers, businesses, and customers. From sourcing raw materials to delivering to the customer doors, the operational effectiveness of the supply chain begins with how the manufacturing leaders build their network strategy.

Prominent global companies have long maximized advantages of location intelligence and visual risk intelligence to effectively drive supply under any circumstances, provided their ability to create visibility across supply chain networks.

Leaders realizing the need to achieve this level of efficiency and agility for their supply chain management, need to tap into real-time data. To build full visibility into the product life cycle, Zapoj supports the evolution of the digital supply chain using its risk analytics and location intelligence capabilities.

Growing visibility that improves supply chain awareness

It stresses mapping every step of the supply chain route including the delivery network to visualize what is happening and where it is critically going to encounter vulnerabilities. This requires the manufacturing industry to create end-to-end visibility across the delivery network to improve predictability, productivity, and efficiency so that they can improve responsiveness to user demands.

For manufacturing leaders, deriving and combining value through several touchpoints across the procurement of supply chain through to the production, distribution, and customer delivery is key to achieving end-to-end supply chain visibility.

Moving production from one location to another is more than migrating physical assets. Many variables factor in determining the success of supply chain operations and efficiencies. It needs to support the workforce that can optimize the transportation of goods and services on time and fulfill customer demands.

With COVID-19 disrupting global operations, manufacturing leaders must know what restrictions are in place that can impact the supply of raw materials or affect labor participation. Using location intelligence, they can visualize

• how their network can function.
• What are the intervals of freights as they need to move goods?
• Which plants can operate?
• How can they use delivery networks in certain conditions to fulfill orders?

Visual risk analytics, which is a powerful feature of Zapoj, helps leaders unravel risk patterns, trends about the current circumstances, and of course weaknesses of the supply chain capability. This real-time comprehension is critical to allocating resources and manpower to help establish the right supply chain techniques.

Common operating picture strengthens logistics decisions

The convergence of location intelligence into supply chain management enables manufacturing leaders to leverage powerful operational visibility. Companies prioritizing location analytics are twice as likely to prevent various sources of disruptions to supply chain operations than those who give location intelligence amiss.

• Location intelligence removing risks out of logistics way

This is a capability that always proves to be a powerful technology that can predict trends in response to location-based events. Helping to monitor phenomenal threats such as natural disasters, extreme weather, political unrest, or man-made disasters- location intelligence can reveal various sources of threat feeds to work with Zapoj visual command center and visualize risk using visual risk intelligence capabilities. This is directly related to how leaders can pinpoint the exact source of disruptions and predict the impact of those threats on production and logistics supplies. If leaders see this as an unavoidable threat, it has a direct impact on the supply chain efficiency.

But, supply chain visibility through a common operating picture prevents the likelihood of operational disruptions- and leaders can optimize their operations depending on evolving scenarios.

• Establishing the best route for logistics

Route optimization is one of the best benefits that leaders can maximize using location intelligence and visual risk intelligence. While in transit, supply chain delivery may come across unpredictable labor unrest, political unrest, man-made disasters like active shootouts or terrorist attacks. Critical weather conditions like massive snowstorms, heavy rainfalls, or floods can impact the transportation of goods. Lying idle due to these critical events has a direct impact on the bottom line of manufacturing industries as they double down the cost of logistics management, extra labor hours, and stocks not moving out fast.

Using location intelligence, stakeholders can fetch weather feeds or critical information from social media channels, news, media, or through people notifying them through built-in crisis communication channels. The real-time risk feed gives them the ability to predict threats ahead of time about a particular location and asset. They can unravel which route has the maximum exposure to risk or its impacts- and also, which route is safe for navigation without the risk of disruptions to supply chain operations.

Smart location technology captures rich context and situation awareness to provide stakeholders and peers with real-time data that improves decision-making. Enabled by high-end communication capabilities, the emergency response team can notify the transportation or logistics staff of the upcoming threat and suggest better solutions.

Overlaying data with geographic locations helps identify patterns of supply chain transportation or movement of vehicles. Location analytics which is an inherent technology of Zapoj helps manufacturing leaders track an entire supply chain route, and optimize their operations at its best.  As a result, leaders can reap the benefits of utilizing their resources appropriately, overcoming supply-related inefficiencies, and implementing best practices to avoid future threats to supply chain management.

Best viewed as a powerful supply chain intelligence tool, Zapoj makes moving of goods, tracking, tracing, and safety of business operations easily achievable for manufacturing leaders. By preventing supply chain disruptions with an end-to-end operating view of the supply operations, Zapoj offers great transparency and performance to keep up with the production and customer demand. In the end, this critical event management tool offers the best value to manufacturing organizations’ financial objectives and secure future initiatives.

To achieve real-time threat mitigation to your supply chain operations and grow revenues, inquire about Zapoj.