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Zapoj CEM Helps Manage a Robust IT System in Higher Education

An unplanned IT failure or IT service interruption which is yet to pose a critical IT threat is an IT incident. The sudden IT incident event means key business operations are not continuing, affecting a large number of service areas and people. In this instance,  near real-time, IT incident management built on Zapoj CEM provides innovative solutions with a plethora of tools- visual risk intelligence, reliable IT alerting to improve decision making and to proactively handle critical IT events in a high-growth and ever-expanding learning environments like colleges and universities.

The CEM technology that Zapoj leverages uses AI-powered solutions to analyze the complexity of IT events, improve visualization with data integration capabilities and enable actions through apps, desktop software for incident responders. The quick actions can deliver faster resolutions to better reinstate IT services and mitigate its impact on operations that college campuses build their interdependencies upon for teamwork and communications.

Here’s what IT outages mean to colleges and universities and how Zapoj as a leading CEM software can help them boost the efficiency of their IT Service Management tool to provide a fantastic experience for staff, faculty, and students.

What system outage costs your higher education?

IT services are the benchmark to ensure uninterrupted learning, research and development, and the undertaking of official communications and consulting services all through the day, year overWhat system outage costs your higher education?year. University administrators, faculty, and staff need a wide range of IT tools that allow them to connect and communicate with students, parents, visitors, stakeholders, and peers.  Crucial administrative operations from building a virtual network for distance learning to offering rapid and ceaseless online course registration- a robust IT service extends its support for user satisfaction, unique experience, and efficiency to help foster an advanced learning environment on a higher level.

The complexities as exacerbated by sudden application downtime, website crash, power outage, low performances of data centers, networks, and high-risk cyber-attacks can heighten the risks of service disruption.

IT downtimes basically are the consequences due to critical events like heavy rains, storms, lighting, and mostly because of unforeseen developments across IT services that appear suddenly as major threats for higher education.

IT downtime insights: 

As reported by Gartner, IT downtime costs businesses 5,600 USD per minute. A more recent report highlights that an estimated $260,000 gets wasted due to an average downtime per hour. The study reported the degradation by 60% in monetary losses since 2016 across businesses.

Higher education faces modern-day IT outages which impact its ability to deliver service across channels, large spanning departments, and leave little room for IT responders to prevent chaos and troubles.

The routine IT challenges in higher education across universities and college campuses can subside when education administrators or the IT service management team rely on visualization and comprehensive IT alerting responses.

Ensure rapid recovery by optimizing Zapoj CEM IT incident management

AI-powered IT incident handling tool builds situational awareness across the IT Service Management and helps with event identification, prioritization, and remediation as a form ofpredictive intelligence the initial restoration process. The IT support team in your college campus can establish a unified network that escalates real-time alerting and helps reduce the impact.

Route incidents with predictive intelligence

The incident routing is still inconvenient for several academic infrastructures as it relies upon manual workflow processes. The worst part is that it wastes valuable time for recovery and does notprovide much progress within scheduled work hours for IT service desk staff. And in parallel, manual handling of workflow is error-prone, and hence routing is more likely to reach the wrong destination, delaying the recovery process.

With predictive intelligence at the core of Zapoj IT incident management, the CEM tool can harness data from multiple existing ITSM solutions, Service desk, IT monitoring tools, and IT alerting tools. By analyzing risk data, Zapoj improves visibility into evolving IT threats and helps route incident handling workflows in an automated way.

Apply IT alerting or IT incident communications

An easy-to-use command center is competent in improving visibility into your workflows. You can use predefined message templates to communicate with IT service desk staff and Apply IT alerting or IT incident communicationsprioritize incident handling response by creating chatOps and war rooms.  Relying on efficient IT alerting or IT incident communication tools, you can discuss with your response team and derive actionable insights into the next step of the recovery process.

Communicate IT issues with on-call management 

Zapoj always makes sure your on-call team is ready to solve the IT issues as soon as the issue is escalated. As you build escalation rules, on-call schedule management is much easier. So, the IT incident team is always confident that the right response team does not miss a critical alert until acknowledged and addresses the issues.

The efficiency of delivering real-time IT incident response improves the mean time to repair (MTTR) and encourages faster resolutions of the IT incident.

Advanced reporting and analytics

Zapoj also carefully designs its analytics dashboard to help the IT response team to assess how they perform during IT incidents. In-depth analysis of team response by area and type help meet service-level expectations. From thisAdvanced reporting and analytics perspective, incidents that take too long to handle can be resolved using performance analytics.

Institutes are looking for more effective IT service tools to provide uninterrupted service to advance their learning and knowledge. Zapoj delivers high-caliber support to mission-critical objectives of higher education learning management and also improves ROI by automating IT alerting. In times of pandemic where virtual learning rests on the active and robust IT infrastructure, embedding Zapoj CEM into your ITSM systems enables higher education to deliver a connected experience for students, faculty, and staff. To support your growth and transform the academic experience, Zapoj CEM must feature in your IT infrastructure. Call us for a demo.

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ZSuite

Zapoj Builds The Best Academic Experience for Safe Return to Campus

A new version of campus or university safety is gaining attention as university stakeholders or leaders are faced with challenges for advancing learning in a new environment of the COVID-19 pandemic. The safe return to campus emphasizes the serious involvement of higher education institutions in ensuring safety and security to health risks for students, faculty, and staff. As they decide to reopen, Zapoj CEM enables a safe campus to allow everyone to connect, maintain, and continue future learning efficiently. By providing all necessary core capabilities to encourage the safe return of students, faculty, administration, management, stakeholders, peers, and staff to the key operations of learning management, Zapoj takes higher education to the next level with uncompromised campus experience.

Ensure campus readiness for everyone at higher educations

Ensure campus readiness for everyone at higher educations

The foremost requirement for a safe return to campus is to ensure effective measurements to help control infection from spreading and build a safe environment for campus reopen.

The Zapoj CEM facilitates stakeholders, administrators, security response teams to monitor the infection trends closely using its location intelligence across campus areas and in close proximity in the neighborhood. Gathering trending data to overlay into the system helps visualize case by case status of the infection based on deaths, infection spike, and also cumulative cases. This advanced level of risk visualizations offers a real-time data mapping capability to make data-driven decisions. Therefore, with a clear picture of the situation, higher education institutions can validate their steps to mitigating infection risk or carefully planning the return to schools.

Zapoj also empowers institutions to bolster their campus readiness preparedness strategy and execution. Using the opt-in services, university administration can invite students and each of the university members to submit their responses about regular health status. Zapoj has built-in contact centers where all member or students details are easily accessible and trackable. This is how universities can take advantage of contact tracing and identify infected students or members by using wellness checks or health status surveys.

Based on the real-time health screening feedback, colleges or universities can plan their strategies accordingly. If certain symptoms appear critical to campus reopen, universities can ramp up their efforts to strictly maintain social distancing norms, warn their people of using the infected locations around the college campus, and most importantly instruct the positive members or students to go for quarantine or people in close contacts with the infected person to take extra precaution to curb the transmission.

Prepare school or campus assets to reopen

The facility mapping gives complete awareness of how higher institutions can better manage
Prepare school or campus assets to reopensignificant criteria of disease control. Using location intelligence technology, Zapoj empowers facility managers to fully utilize its geospatial mapping solutions to quickly identify the risk-prone zones inside the premises of the campus or within a particular space such as library, office, administrative departments, and anywhere in the university.

This smart approach provides an additional advantage of maintaining social distancing compliance, while also preventing any chance of close proximity encounters. Location mapping observes the social distancing parameters to help with assessment. For instance, if any encounters occur between a healthy member and an infected person, location-based facility mapping instantly sends out notifications about interactions for immediate recovery processes. And in parallel, managers can optimize contact tracing to determine the infected person and identity places with higher risks of contact transmission.

Location tracking when combined with contact tracing capability can be more of use to improve density management. Location tracking is especially important to track density in some spaces like halls or events and, alert over violation of social distancing parameters.

Zapoj prioritizes sanitation drive as a step towards building a clean environment that promises a safe and risk-free campus for students. Real-time infection status through contact tracing is a flexible capacity of Zapoj to keep track of full audit trail history, and therefore, ensuring cleaning tasks when and as necessary over time.

From initiating isolation activities to launching cleaning initiatives, Zapoj CEM is purpose-built to prevent transmission risk and support continuity.

Enable return to campus conveniently with Zapoj

A safe return to campus also requires vaccination status on campus. Zapoj CEM is capable of managing a vaccination drive for students. Higher educationBuild The Best Academic Experience with Safe Return to Campusinstitutions may need this approach to amp up their campus readiness. Enrolling campus members, staff, faculty, and students in the vaccination is readily available with Zapoj contact tracing capabilities. As members sign up for opt-in services, they can communicate their current status after vaccination and receive reminders for the next dose of vaccine. By having everyone in the contact centers, administrators can keep track of vaccine status and ensure wellness checks. Multiple communication channels also help members continue the vaccination drive and meet all necessary requirements for a safe return to campus.

Zapoj CEM gives scalability with a number of solutions to effectively manage campus readiness. Contact tracing, location intelligence for proximity checks, vaccination status, cleanliness drive are ensuring campus safety and prepare universities to embrace and encourage the safe return to university or campus.

As you begin to reopen, get Zapoj CEM. Contribute not only towards continuity of learning but also ensure active participation in limiting the spread of deadly diseases like COVID-19. Need to know more. Call us or ask for a demo.

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ZSuite

Get smart visitor management solutions for higher education safety with Zapoj CEM

College or university campuses are none less than a micro-city, spreading over acres of land with an uncountable number of people moving around its multiple buildings or facilities and between departments. Staff, faculty, students, and additional people gather here- the number of visitors also fluctuates on any given day, which requires the university to keep track of its people for extra layers of security and safety.

An extreme challenge reveals the inability of the emergency response team of a higher education institution when there are a large group of students, parents, visitors, and sports fans gathering for different events and purposes. To manage an influx of people across college campuses and ensure their safety, an emergency communications system may lack robustness of Critical Event Management capabilities and visitor management applications altogether.

Visitor emergency communications when combined with Critical Event Management enables the higher education institutions to leverage the best-in-class emergency mitigations tools for its people to keep them informed, prepare them for safe evacuation, and ultimately keep them safe out of danger.

Here’s how SaaS-based CEM platform tool, Zapoj helps security operations managers at higher education with comprehensive visitor management solutions.

Why on-site scenarios at campus call for additional efficiencies and conveniences with emergency communications?

Why on-site scenarios at campus call for additional efficiencies and conveniences with emergency communications

A high volume of visitors can pose safety risks as operational challenges continue to linger with increasing need for quick evacuation processes. Keeping a tab of every visitor on-premise and monitoring their movement is a key approach to discovering what’s going on in and around, and therefore assessing the risk factors.

Campus events – sports day, music fest, public figure speech, including campus visit, parents weekend and more such events are huge crowd-pullers than usual days at the university premises. There could be many such instances that result in unforeseen risks from active shootout, gunman attack, campus fire, and facility damage.

Such scenario urges for an immediate requirement of emergency communications which helps locate and reach the visitors during an emergency. Most importantly, real-time emergency updates are crucial to making sure that every person whosoever is in danger could be reached out during emergency procedures and provided with information that guides them properly. Leveraging Zapoj CEM helps scale visitor management and notifications, while allowing for real-time threat visibility that improves emergency preparedness management.

Act quickly in different critical scenarios with Zapoj CEM solutionsAct quickly in different critical scenarios with Zapoj CEM solutions

Zapoj uses AI capabilities, which makes identifying threat scopes of unpredictable risks efficiently, enabling emergency security teams to use the built-in contact centers immediately and escalate emergency communications.

As the visitors or groups on university campuses are diverse, Zapoj contact center is flexible to adapt to event-based opt-ins that allow each type of group to sign up and receive real-time event information for increased visibility into the emergency situations . Not only is the contact center fast to get visitor information, but also the predefined messages are scalable to save time and shareable across social media platforms and other channels to enhance reach during emergencies. During any critical situations, higher educations can responsibly connect with the targeted recipients via Facebook, text, webpage, voice call, and on email also.

Marking restricted zones

The colleges or university can invite different types of visitor groups to its public events. And in parallel, those visitors can also be eager to know more about the safety preparedness. For events like music fests or guest lectures, visitors become careful about their safety.

Marking restricted zones

As part of robust visitor management procedures, emergency security teams can mark hazardous zones as restricted areas. With this precaution in place, in case of an emergency fire breakout, Zapoj CEM  can detect this threat and relay the data to the command center. Using geolocation, Zapoj can mark the exact location of the command center and help the emergency rescue team reach the targeted locations and launch the evacuation process.

Providing on-site visitor management experience

Providing on-site visitor management experience

Zapoj CEM using its location intelligence technology can help track the whereabouts of visitors in the premises. This capability also enables higher education to know how many visitors and college or university members are on the premises currently. This is helpful in guiding people for evacuation if any emergency occurs.

Accessibility is another security feature of Zapoj CEM to help enhance visitor management. With opt-in features, the identification of visitors can be established, thus eliminating the chances of unauthorized persons to access the premises.

Location technology also scales as an highly efficient wayfinding system to give an opportunity to navigate the large premises with ease. Multiple departments sprawling from one point to another is making it difficult for visitors to locate the right destination, wasting their time and adding to poor visitor experience. Zapoj CEM can help locate the target location as the visitors sign-up for opt-ins and reach the selected destination with no more extra effort.

Visitor engagement and management is an important criteria to ensure safety and security for every visitor higher education has on special days. The ability to provide real-time information through emergency communications is one of the basic requirements that college or university can provide to its people. Zapoj CEM helps in this perspective by enabling real-time emergency response and crisis management capabilities to provide improved visitor experience.

To learn more about Zapoj CEM, and its smart solutions for visitor management, give us a call or book a demo.

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ZSuite

Top 3 Things Higher Education Can Do To Build Resilience

Overview 

A real-time risk mapping allows higher school authorities to allocate appropriate resources to anticipate, locate, and respond to critical threats with the help of location intelligence and crisis communications- ensuring safety and security for everyone on and off campus.

Key Takeaways 

  • Emergency responders can use visual risk intelligence built on Zapoj CEM to detect the potential threat and its impacts.
  • Security teams can derive data-driven insights into threats and achieve accuracy with decision-making.
  • Higher education authorities can rely upon Zapoj CEM to evaluate safety measurements at campus and build a safe and secure learning environment.

An integrated suite of emergency communications and visual risk intelligence gives stakeholders, facility management and emergency security team of a higher education institution the freedom to prepare their contingency plan effectively. Taking into account the volatile nature of any critical events, getting insights into the trends can improve understanding of the potential risk and anticipate their impact on the facilities, people, assets, and operation continuity, encouraging remediation efforts rapidly.

To keep ahead of the critical events, higher education needs real-time data feed from a variety of sources – IoT sensors, drones, satellites, social media channels to achieve speed and relevancy so that they can establish accuracy in decision making and reduce mean time to repair.

Unpreparedness ramps up unprecedented risks

Several academic administrators still rely on disjointed emergency communications systems when they seek to adopt tools for critical event mitigation.

The diverse and evolving nature of critical events can be intimidating when they ensue. Extreme weather conditions – floods, cyclones, including other natural disasters like earthquakes, system outages or IT incidents, campus shootouts or gunman attacks, or disease outbreak could amplify the risk factors for higher education,requiring them to ensure safety and security for their students, staff, administrators, stakeholders, peers, and partners. The ability to mitigate risk, keep everyone safe, and restore functions at scale is the pillar stone to ensure resilience.

Campus safety

This powerful approach on the other hand could send out a message to students and their families about their capabilities to help build an efficient emergency preparedness strategy, and also inculcate an outlook to be a reliable and safe academic institution. To begin a comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation plan, higher education institutions can seek Zapoj, a fundamental CEM application to eliminate risk and build resilience into higher education ecosystems.

Let’s illustrate how administrators, stakeholders, and instructional staff can use Zapoj to become resilient by tapping into competitive advantage.

Keeping your people safe on and off campus

Keeping your people safe on and off campus

Campus safetyis more significant than ever since the pandemic has hit, requiring colleges and universities to engage with students, faculty, and people all across campus to keep them informed and safe.

Higher education needs a fast and effective crisis response that is highly effective and scalable during diverse campus events like violence, active shootout, fire, and critical weather events. With Zapoj CEM, AI-powered visual risk intelligence can streamline messages and provide only actionable insights to improve decision making and deliver highly targeted messages to the right people.

During a variety of critical events, designated emergency response teams can categorize event types and automate notifications specific to geolocations of the receiver when in harm’s way.

This way higher education can build robust recovery operations and encourage a collaborative environment focused on student’s safety.

By using Zapoj Critical Event Management, university stakeholders, and all partners can tap into the contact tracing capabilities and crisis communications, enabling effective management of disease control, implementing social-distancing norms, and preventing exposure. This helps the top leadership and emergency team at the universities abide by the regulatories to support the Safe return to campus. Also, colleges and universities failing to encourage reopening of learning institutions can reconsider their decision only if they seek help from a critical management tool.

Making learning more accessible

Apart from making campus safe for students, Zapoj CEM also helps ensure an uninterrupted learning experience. With the formal education shifting to a remote ecosystem, colleges today need to employ virtual learning to adjust to the current curriculum.Making learning more accessible

Providing robust IT systems not only keeps up with the education but also helps in unprecedented administrative work, ensures wi-fi connectivity in libraries, and keeps networks running for administrations to continue operations.  A few seconds of IT outage can impact the learning experience and also suspend core operations. By identifying the root cause of IT incidents, Zapoj automates digital workflows to the right IT responder and helps eliminate IT issues instantly.

Improving on-site coordination

In the event of an emergency situation during campus events, Zapoj encourages collaboration using location intelligence and enables crisis communication in real-time.

Knowing the whereabouts of the exact number of staff, students, and visitors on the campus, universities can improve outreach and enhance evacuation during fire, shootout or extreme weather events.

Visitor management

Visitor management is also a great way to ensure safety of people on campus or monitor movement of unauthorized people.  At the same time, location intelligence can be used to help visitors orient themselves and navigate the unidentified routes independently. Simultaneously, visitors can also know the restricted zones and avoid being safe.

Conclusion

Deriving values from Zapoj CEM gives the university, its stakeholders, and leadership an optimized experience to be resilient by defying the odds of critical events. By using the Critical Event Management platform, higher education can plan, monitor, mitigate and recover the impacts of critical events more effectively. They can therefore enhance their learning efficiency, improve learning outcomes, and deliver bespoke campus experience.

Many higher education can benefit from critical event management. To know more about Zapoj, give us a call.

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Prepare for campus safety with Zapoj CEM

Lately, colleges and universities have explored a new side to emergency threats- having a one-size-fits-all crisis communication tool cannot entirely focus on risk mitigation at campus premises. The volatile nature of the world is exposing students, faculty and its staff to unpredictable campus threats that largely involve terrorisms and active shooter.

AI-powered location aware technology with built-in risk intelligence that helps anticipate unpredictable campus events can support the recovery efforts to minimize risk and create a safe campus environment.

As colleges feel the need for a single glass of pane to
allow situational awareness
, a location-based Critical Event Management tool like Zapoj can level up their mitigation efforts to be compliant with the Clery Act- one of the significant law guidelines that ensures safety and security for college or university students. The Clery Act compliance is one side to ensuring student safety- building the best security practices can address a terrorism event or a an active shoot incident and ensure a resilient campus.

Those are complicated emergency situations and decision-makers need to utilize location intelligence as a basic approach to detect threats on assets and human experience.

Here’s how decision-makers at higher education institutions can enable a safe campus culture using Zapoj CEM.

The need for campus event safety

Large crowds are a common scene at college music concerts, sporting events, and lectures, and hence they have higher chances of inherent risks.

Missing an important threat opportunity means fostering an unsafe environment that could help with active shooting or allow rumors of a violence. As the basic survival instinct prompts to apply any measure to escape the scene, it basically sends shock waves across the campus premises that finally ends up in crowd rush, resulting in the most possible casualties from stampede. The high-speed storm can add an additional layer of concern while mass shooting rampage continues.  Security and emergency management needs to adopt an optimal level of campus safety readiness. The disaster preparedness process requires location intelligence to identify risks and the ability to communicate instantly with its people in harm’s way.

Given the rapid cases of active shooter events – especially deadliest mass shootings at college campuses or events, college students are worried about unsafe campus events. This evolving scenario requires the security and emergency management at higher education to revisit their emergency plans to simplify location intelligence and emergency response.

Better insights into threats with location intelligence

Better insights into threats with location intelligence

To proactively leverage the power of emergency communications and mass notifications , emergency preparedness plans must drive real-time threat feed to build visual risk intelligence.

Location intelligence predicts the source of threats and their impacts in real-time on human life and facilities. It’s true organizations are using a large tech stack to track data feeds that provide visibility into incident events of a particular area and help assess the risk impacts on facilities or life.  Tapping into data although is easy, making sense of it seems challenging. Data needs appropriate comprehension to help join dots between dispersed components and ensure information accuracy.

Build situational awareness

Build situational awareness

The capability to identify risk intelligence varies by how disjointed screens relay information and a single glass of pane communicates threat. 

Basically a traditional command center that higher educations use for the campus safety are not appropriately connected with proper locations. The data feeds it streams are presented on different disjointed screens, making it difficult for security analysts to monitor and develop accurate situational awareness.

The command center built on Zapoj gives a holistic view of its campus events- its surroundings, assets, and people all through a single pane of glass. It fetches all incident feeds and overlays them with so many other sources of data feed. Campus administration and security response teams can derive valuable metrics using AI-powered risk intelligence and assess the trends of threats.

With predictive analytics identifying the possible potential disruptions through a single glass of pane, security teams can gain situational awareness and improve their decision making. This helps higher education alert people who’s responsible to mitigate the risk and ensure safety to people in harm’s way.

Quick alerts and mass notifications for campus community Quick alerts and mass notifications for campus community

improving emergency response is critical to ensuring active remediation of critical threats on campus. During an emergency event, campus authority must look to provide contextual awareness through its notification message. Not every specific emergency notification would work for all people in danger. For different scenarios of an active shooter, one segment of people may need emergency notification to evacuate, the other section may hide out to avoid risk, while another segment of the community requires instruction to help with the recovery process.

Zapoj Critical Event Management gives the emergency response teams the flexibility to preconfigure messages to fit the demanding situations and rapidly reach masses with accurate information. The critical mass notifications also never miss people who’s in danger, which reach the destination via multi-modal paths – including emails, voice calls, social media, SMS or text messages and many more channels. Zapoj critical alerting or mass notifications also escalate via two-way messaging to ensure they are acknowledged and to notify if the recipient is safe or may require immediate support for rescue operations.

Be compliant with the Clery Act

Be compliant with the Clery Act

The risks associated with special or large campus events are concerning. Neglecting the Clery Act and your basic responsibilities to have your contingency plans ready means you expose your students and people to life-threatening mass shooting, or terrorism incidents at campus events. 

The very basic requirement to comply with the Clery Act is to establish a dedicated critical emergency communication and mass notification that could ensure campus safety. According to the Clery Act, universities or colleges must reveal their steps to controlling threats on campus and the inability to comply with the law may draw penalties for them.

The rapid frequency of campus critical events are a growing concern for higher education and its students. The Clery Act provides guidelines on how universities and colleges can keep their students informed as emergency incidents are unleashing.

According to the act, the critical event management platform must emphasize on critical communications to alert its stakeholders and help them with the rapid preparedness process. Additionally, the critical communication must provide real-time feed to its students and keep them informed of the situations. By providing visual risk intelligence and location intelligence,  Zapoj helps avoid information fatigue and deliver the right message with its mass notification or emergency alerting system. To simply put, Zapoj Critical Event Management can provide data analytics and reporting, simplifying compliance with the Clery Act.

Conclusion

Critical event management platform Zapoj builds a robust recovery plan to combat catastrophic events at campus. To be compliant with the Clery Act and most importantly ensure campus safety, higher education needs AI-powered risk intelligence and emergency communication tools. Using its location intelligence, situational awareness, and mass notification capabilities, Zapoj helps bolster campus security and provides a safe environment for everyone associated with the campus community including your students, faculty, and staff.

If it is a campus event or natural disaster, Zapoj keeps your people informed and safe and to the best of its potential, it encourages resiliency.

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Prevent Store Disruptions with Zapoj Critical Event Management

Anticipating external risks always gives you an edge- you can prevent any major consequences like avoiding indefinite business closure, revisiting recovery policies, or operating without as much workforce as you may need. Right from the cruel impacts of the ongoing pandemic to very distinctive emergencies, your retail store operations can fall prey to risks at any point in time.

Here in this blog, we discuss how Zapoj, an AI-powered CEM tool helps retail owners mitigate the impacts of some major critical events, avoid store disruptions, and promote resiliency.

Critical events that disrupt store operations

Critical events are fickle and unpredictable, and they are different by nature. In general, critical events have one thing in common- to disrupt operations irrespective of how they evolve. The most usual level of threats to your business comes from

  • Man-made disasters – civil unrest, active shooter, terrorist attacks, riots, or strikes
  • Natural disasters – bad weather, cyclone, flood, storms, earthquake, pandemic, and wildfire. 

Each of the threats has a different level of impact on your business, which is detrimental to your success. Let’s see how they impact your retail store operations.

How do critical events impact your store operations?

Right from man-made disasters to natural disasters, the threat scopes have increased for stores and their business resiliency. 

Retail alone garners $3.8 trillion worth of annual revenues, which is the easiest target of terror attacks and perhaps more impactful at disrupting services and sales. Significantly, the number of attacks has risen from 14,371 to 18302 between 2006 and 2021. Retailers being unequipped to handle the situation, it is more of a challenge to keep everyone informed and safe. 

Active shootout incidents are quite relevant during this ongoing pandemic, however, this is not also a new trend. Mass shootings span beyond campus or streets, they are now more active in areas like grocery stores and other retail stores.

Natural disasters are quite impactful and effective in disrupting services at retail stores. More than this common phenomena, earthquakes, flooding, severe weather, tropical cyclones, winter weather, or wildfire can drive direct economic losses. Since 2019, we have witnessed as many as 12 individual natural disaster events with four severe weather outbreaks, four tropical cyclones, two flooding events, and wildfires on average every year across the world. Among them, the costliest economic peril was severe weather events. 

As they add up, an unprecedented growth challenge may fall out. Here’s what potential impact you can expect from these threats:  

Lost Revenues: 

In the retail sphere alone, severe weather costs your business $630 billion in lost revenues.  In situations like natural disasters, retail stores operating in any industry are likely to face disruptions too.

Man-made catastrophes including pandemics are directly related to panic-stricken buying behavior, even though store operational managers also have little to no resources that can support reopening at the earliest. Going forward, small businesses are more vulnerable to these critical situations. This means financial losses are always high incurred by shortfalls in sales, drop in cash flow, and business closures.

Waste of inventory 

Extreme weather conditions, anything from tornadoes and hurricanes to heat and snow can easily qualify to cause damage to your inventory. Since you don’t anticipate or have any preparedness to handle these situations, more than often critical events can affect your inventories, and not to mention your bottom line.  It results in being understocked in the coming months, which later adds to difficulties in order fulfillment or shipment. 

Employee safety at stake

Pandemic, natural disasters, or man-made disasters can have potential threats to employee safety. Your employees are scattered between different departments, they are traveling, or working off-site. A different kind of isolated situation can become threatening to their lives or security. It’s an organizational duty to improve the safety and security of your employees. An inability to implement or ensure an enhanced safety or security can lead to employees being out of action, which directly affects productivity and business continuity. 

Lost LTV from customer churn 

As situations aggravate with changing norms of critical events, you are less likely to restore operations timely. A lot of time goes into the decision-making with stakeholders and partners to decide the next course of the action plan. Being understocked or having not enough stocks, you end up frustrating your customers. Simultaneously, your store is unable to operate with a full workforce, which makes it difficult to manage the influx of shoppers, meaning it sends out a negative impression and adds to customer fatigue. These are enough reasons to reduce the lifetime value of customers and therefore cause customer churn.  

Brand damage 

The less you are prepared to handle the evolving critical situations with time, the more you are at risk of losing your brand reputation. Every second matters as you lose momentum due to inadequate inventories, staffing issues, and resources. Delays in business continuity impact user experience, their trust, and confidence in you. Altogether, your brand falls apart, and your customers tend to lean towards those businesses that meet their demands. 

How can you prevent store disruptions?

Here’s Zapoj that helps prevent store disruptions by allowing granular level threat intelligence. Identify if your people or assets are in harm’s way and provide accurate context to reduce their impacts.  

Keeping employees safe and secure 

Be it pandemic, disease, or other threat-related updates, Zapoj facilitates reaching out to the right employee at the right time. 

During incidents like active shootouts or natural disasters, geofencing or location awareness gives you contextual information and helps you detect who’s in harm’s way.  This capability is also powerful for contact tracing for COVID-19 infections that ensures the safety and security of your employees.

Keeping up with customer demand 

To be able to prevent store disruptions and continuously meet the customer demand in the most critical times is the nice thing about increasing brand loyalty and earning customer trust. Zapoj CEM dedicatedly takes care of this important affair.

  • On-call schedules – Resilience is key to maintaining your retail or eCommerce success. An unpredictable emergency- active shootout or natural disaster that impacts employee capacity can cause immediate shortfall and affect normal operations. To make up for capacity shortages, automated on-call schedules can fill emergency shifts and help keep up with operations. Zapoj automatically sends out notifications to available team members to resolve issues as they arise. 

 

Zapoj is a geographically dispersed system so it can reach employees at any time and anywhere on devices that they use. Hence, sustaining capacity and restoring operations become much easier.

  • Situational awareness- By pulling in data from different sources, you can integrate them into a Zapoj visual Risk intelligence to gain a common operating picture. This gives you situational awareness of the day-to-day challenges and makes it easier to identify potential threats which are likely to disrupt your operations. Using this capability, disaster preparedness is faster and more effective and you can keep your people, assets or inventory protected. So, you are prepared to handle risks and manage operations to meet customer expectations. 

 

With Zapoj providing real-time risk intelligence, store operation managers can easily sustain operations from threats and save their employees. Let’s discover how Zapoj works to help with effective risk management that advocates for business resiliency.

Zapoj makes threat response fast and effective

Organizations everywhere need to protect their people, assets, and infrastructure as critical events are erupting on a global scale. Combating these situations with just traditional systems is not enough as they are not engineered to work through the complexity of data. Zapoj is designed in such a way to handle complicated data so you can work through data, identify and evaluate risks, and prevent its impact.

  • Discover:Your risk analysts work round the clock to keep track of potential threats. Zapoj gathers hyper-localized data in an automated way from social media, local media, government, or private bodies into its system. This is a scalable way for your analysts to identify the type and level of risk, and derive accurate insights into it, thereby, making it effortless to achieve context to the information while enabling accurate reporting without any ambiguity. 
  • Action: Getting accurate information is vital to cut through the noise, which also helps reduce time to respond and act. You can filter through only the priority-based information and pass it to responders- employees, stakeholders, peers, or partners- to take necessary action. 
  •  Examine: Zapoj uses an auto-escalation process to automate these reports. No matter where your response team or stakeholders are, Zapoj CEM can instantly help build a single-click conference bridge to synchronize your team and accelerate collaboration and response. Multi-modal communication capabilities supported by clear and concise pre-built message templates help save time in reaching the right person via voice calls and texts on any device. Therefore, the level of accuracy and precision that Zapoj provides keeps you ahead of incidents and helps mitigate them before they become tough to handle. 
  • Analyze: Critical events are inevitable and they keep coming. Mitigating risks just before, during, or after isn’t everything. We all want to keep our business resilient and not to mention – save resources in risk mitigation efforts. The post-incident analysis is a key to build a robust recovery plan by evaluating areas for improvement and more scopes into what steps you should take on the basis of different types of critical events- as you ensure accountability of your risk mitigation efforts, you will be better prepared to prevent risks and business losses. 

CEM in today’s evolving critical environment is not a nice-to-have tool, but a must-have business resilient platform.  Zapoj is nicely designed to expedite profits or cut losses while also advocating for your brand value.  Want a demo? Get in touch with us today.

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ZSuite

Preparing CSO/CISO for physical and digital threats

How CSO or CISO need to prepare for physical and digital security threats

Cyberattacks, once an underrated topic to discuss, suddenly evolved into a huge concern for organizations after the COVID-19 pandemics forced businesses to stop their operations. With so many uncertainties still doing rounds, especially the ongoing second wave of the pandemic and the probability of the third wave, cybersecurity is capturing high attention to meeting agendas across the board for CSOs/CISOs. The continuous challenge to meet the safety and security standards that could ensure network wellbeing, employee mental and physical health, and business resiliency is becoming more exacerbated. Adjusting to the new normal of hybrid work culture needs to pay more attention to protecting high confidential corporate data while encouraging safer work from home environment. Meeting these high expectations can help CSOs and CISOs keep up with employee productivity, business continuity, and revenue generation.

Cyber threats- an evolving challenge for CSOs and CISOs

Home workspaces were the only devices made available to most workforces as soon as the lockdowns began. Organizations with little to no adequate resources at hand quickly nodded to these norms without measuring their effects. But, the saddest part, many organizations, especially small-scale organizations failed to provide a cyber-safe telecommuting ecosystem. The sudden scenario exposed the organization’s security at risk and led to cybercrime inadvertently.

As per reports from National Cyber Security Center, there was an increase in cyberattacks during the pandemic. WFH was the leading cause of this concern because of the lack of inherent protective home devices.

On top of it, telecommuting is a critical step towards making public health measures effective to curb the virus outbreak. Organizations encouraging this protocol have been facing novel challenges due to the more complex nature of employee health safety standards. Also, not being able to work in a centralized environment, employee communication took a hit, impacting their mental health and also decreasing productivity.

Classification of physical and digital threats organizations are facing

As businesses reopen after months of lockdowns, organizations face dual challenges

  • Maintaining COVID-19 compliance to ensure the physical security of their people.
  • Maintaining digital security to prevent cyber threats like scams, phishing, and more.

Physical threats

Physical threats are those components that pose risks to mental health or overall wellbeing. In between reopening and reclosing of businesses, the most grueling challenges for organizations or security officers are to maintain social distancing norms at office premises, maintain a proper screening process to identify COVID-19 symptoms so as to be alert, and aid in preventing the transmission risks. The incapability to maintain the basic norms can result in so many issues

  • Transmission of infectious disease at large
  • Mass infection of employees
  • The shutdown of business operations
  • Revenue losses

Apart from the pandemic threats, bad weather, natural disasters like floods, cyclones, or man-made disasters like terrorist attacks, or active shootouts cause the same consequences for businesses.

Digital threats

Digital threats are information shared online via websites, emails, or landing pages, or social media can deliberately cause risks to physical or information security risks.

One of the key digital threats that invited risks for CSOs or CISOs during a pandemic

Social engineering

Social engineering scams are proliferating during the pandemic. Many novel tactics of social engineering have surfaced in the wake of COVID-19. Employees are an easy target for cyber intruders to infringe data or steal important credentials.

  • Video conferencing led to data breaches for more than half a million people.
  • A phishing scam shouldering on the key interest of people to get updates of coronavirus related news also deceived.
  • False emails containing malware caused disruptions to IT systems.
  • Phishing emails with malicious links siphoned off millions of dollars.
  • Phishing-related data breaches related to WFH are likely to cause $137,000 worth of losses.

Due to these evolving situations, organizations need to boost employee cyber-security training more than ever, which is a growing challenge for them to.

Threats to concentrate on while an employee is working from home

So, due to the changing norms of work culture in society, we have a reduced workforce, putting more pressure on the employees. Not able to comply with the new work from a home ecosystem, employees tend to compromise their mental health. Away from a supervised environment like that of an office system, mindlessness may crop up. Additionally, working from home does not offer the similar degree of cybersecurity that the office follows. Besides, there are a lot of threats to home devices

  • Absence of regular anti-virus or anti-malware scans
  • Lack of sophisticated cyber threat prevention measures
  • Weaker Wi-Fi networks, which is susceptible to cyberattacks

All these are a great opportunity for hackers or cybercriminals to prey on personal devices to steal corporate files and data and pose threats to organization reputations.

However, be it physical or digital threats, a CEM platform provides organizations with capabilities to implement immediate critical communications, keep everyone informed of the evolving situations, and prevent the risks before it becomes a huge organizational risk.

 

How CEM helps CSO / CISO during uncertain times and how it improves response times during physical and digital security threats

Zsuite CEM platform is built to handle critical information in a more flexible way that helps organizations with IT incident management, disease prevention, and business continuity. Some of its sophisticated features guarantee a great level of flexibility and agility to curb major incidents or critical events quickly.

Critical Communications

To simply put, critical communications give organizations the ability to communicate before, during, after critical events. Zsuite features robust crisis communication features to help CSOs/CISOs design their recovery plan to mitigate threats that stem from physical or digital threats.

Two-way communications, multi-channel message delivery, mass notifications, critical alerts, comprehensive contact center along with powerful pre-built message templates make handling crisis communication effortless and efficient. Leveraging these tools can speed up the communication process for CSO/CISOs, keep stakeholders, partners, and employees informed, and give them much-needed resources to communicate at the right time with the right person. Hence, critical communications can improve response time, thus accelerating the recovery process.

Situation awareness

Zsuite unleashes the power of data intelligence to identify risks at granular levels. As this CEM platform helps capture unstructured data from different sources, CSOs can have data relevancy and therefore, enjoy the flexibility of connecting dots, and find missing links. This is probably a faster process to gain situational awareness of the evolving situations, which gives the organization a competitive advantage in identifying risks and opportunities, allocate resources, and communicate efficiently with everyone exposed to risks.

Common operating picture

In-depth visibility into how the critical events can evolve with the changing time or location is an ideal mechanism that provides a common operating picture. It is situational awareness that improves understanding of the critical events for every emergency response team or CSOs/CISOs. Based on what organizations see on the system improve their action plan. It becomes easier to predict threats to physical or digital assets, determine ways to mitigate risk, improve future plans, and help boost business resiliency.

Zsuite CEM is pioneering ways to combat the growing challenges of COVID-19 threats or familiar critical events to businesses. Whether you move to hybrid culture or still follow the traditional operating model, you need the expertise of Zsuite CEM to prevent business threats. Schedule a demo today.

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ZSuite

How Zapoj Zsuite CEM Improves Business Resilience

Overview

Zsuite CEM software automates what is often a slow, manual process of determining if a specific threat impacts your assets (people, facilities, supply chain, IT services, etc.). We provide customers with the capabilities needed to:

  1. Automatically Discover threats (bad things) nearby critical assets (good things). If the threat is not severe enough to require any action, Zsuite saves our customers money by avoiding the unnecessary disruption of responding to a false/low impact event. If the threat impacts our customers’ assets we alert them and then Locate Who might be impacted?
    Who is needed to respond?
    Who needs to be informed?
  2. As we notify the ‘right people’, we also take Action starting any standard operating procedures or runbook activities needed to restore normal operations.
  3. Provide communication and collaboration necessary for response to implement Crisis or business continuity solution 
  4. We capture all the details about our customers’ critical events so they can Analyze what happened to help them learn from past experiences and be better prepared for new bad things. 

One of the key benefits of the Zapoj Zsuite Critical Event Management Platform is that it allows customers, often with minimal support from us, to address new use cases by innovating on the platform 

 

Common Customer Use Cases

Top Use CasesChallengeExamples of Critical Events
Maintain ResiliencyMaintaining business resiliency in the face of unplanned events which threaten the continuity of operationsNatural disasters; weather events; building fires; political events (e.g., protests, changes of government, upheavals, and terrorist attacks); accident management; power outages; transportation outages; and government emergency operations
Activate TeamsActivating and organizing the work of response teams to respond to critical eventsResponse team activation; union callouts; staffing backfills quota; IT team on-call support and Healthcare team alerting
Protect  EmployeesProtecting  employees amid threats such as severe weather, violence (workplace, terrorism), or environmental upsetsEvacuation management and mustering, widespread health risks or scares, active shooters, armed intruders, missing persons, kidnappings, travel risk management, duty of care compliance, and hazardous material releases (e.g., gas leaks)
Mitigate Supply Chain RiskMinimizing disruptions to supply chains from critical eventsSupply chain risk mitigation and resolution by identifying threats to delivery routes, border crossings, and access to manufacturer’s raw materials/resources.

Each of these use case categories varies based on the verticals/market segments that Zapoj Zsuite targets.

  • Corporate
  • Healthcare
  • State and local governments

When responding to most critical events, multiple use cases are often used. For example, during severe weather or natural disaster, organizations will typically use Zapoj Zsuite  to:

  • Maintain Resiliency by initiating business continuity plans that move mission-critical services (like customer service or e-commerce) to other regions not impacted.
  • Activate Teams by notifying and confirming which employees need and can return to work to either provide a mission-critical service from a back-up location or restoration teams that are needed to start bringing local services back to normal operations.
  • Protect Employees by notifying employees to “Stay safe at home” and to not come to the office unless required.
  • Mitigate Supply Chain Risk by rerouting ‘just in time’ or ‘perishable’ materials to an open facility that can safely store or use the materials.

 

When one disruptive event occurs it is often followed by a cascading set of related disruptive events which require additional teams to be activated or other Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to be started. Zapoj Zsuite can support our customers across the multiple needs that often arise when responding to critical events. Some examples of common use cases where multiple simultaneous events occur are shown. 

Use CaseMaintain Resilience Activate TeamsProtect EmployeesMitigate Supply Chain Risk
Active shooterYYY
Terrorist attackYYY
HazmatYYY
Severe Weather and Natural DisasterYYYY
Response Team CoordinationYYY
Mass Casualty Response and coordinationYY
IT Incident ResponseYY
IoT Device AlteringY
Product RecallYY
Public CrisisYY
Supply Chain YY
Infectious Diseases YYY

 

What Value does Zsuite provide Customers?

At the highest-level, customers choose Zsuite because we help business, government and healthcare organizations be better prepared to rapidly respond to – and even avoid – sudden, unexpected disruptions. The Zapoj Zsuite Critical Event Management Platform enables organizational resilience on an unprecedented scale – combining real-time risk event detection, situational awareness, and integrated response and collaboration from a single, enterprise-wide view across critical events types.  Zapoj Zsuite CEM solutions provide strategic value to many parts of a business.

Categories
ZSuite

101 of Critical Event Management and Why Your Organization Needs It

Critical event management for business resilience

What Is Critical Event Management (CEM)

Critical Event Management is a software platform, which ensures organizations rapidly respond to business disruptions or even avoid – sudden and unexpected disruptions. An end-to-end CEM solution provides real-time information about global risk events and threats, alerts you when any of the organization’s assets (People, facilities, supply chain, IT) are exposed to threats. It further enables organizations in automating the response to reduce the mean time between failure, optimize crisis communications, and provide a common operating picture to all key stakeholders- Executives, CIO, CEOs, Managers, HRs, Business Continuity, Crisis Management  and Security teams. CEM software improves business resilience for organizations to accomplish the mission.

 

What are the essential components of CEM software?

5 important Critical Event Management Components are

Who should use Critical Event Management?

A CEM platform is ideal for any organization, big or small, that is looking to converge operation management activities like security planning and management, business continuity and disaster recovery, IT operations and service delivery management, Crisis communications across the entire organization to create an integrated, cross-functional, all-hazards response. Examples include small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprise organizations, healthcare facilities, schools, hospitals and government agencies.

 

Under what circumstances a business can use CEM software?

A critical event management software is a key component of business continuity planning and execution, crisis management  and communications. It brings together the best of your critical communications and crisis management resources to ensure your organization is prepared for any of the risk events given below:

  • Natural disasters and weather-related incidents, such as floods, wildfires and snowstorms
  • IT incidents such as infrastructure issues, database down or application slow response.
  • Denial of access incidents, such as fires or chemical spills or Riots
  • Power outages or Facility disruptions
  • Cyber attacks and data breaches
  • Critical equipment or infrastructure failure
  • Pandemics such as COVID-19 and the influenza virus
  • Active shooter incidents
  • Supply chain disruptions
  • And much more

 

How CEM improves Organizational Resilience

Business Resillience

Let’s define what Organizational Resilience means before we understand how CEM improves it.  Organization Resiliency: The ability of a firm to deliver on its brand promise, no matter what the disruption is and how bad it is.

Modern-day customers expect your business to be available round the clock. To meet customer demands, today’s business must strive for resiliency.

 

CEM platform brings together

  • Risk intelligence that proactively assesses potential threats before they become critical events.
  • Common operating pictures of Assets (People, facilities, supply chain, IT services, etc), risk events, and crisis management tasks.
  • Automated workflows to implement business continuity standard operating procedures
  • Communication tools such as Chat, Video Conferences for Teams, and one-to-one voice calls or SMS to enable rapid collaboration for response teams.
  • Analytics that provides Mean Time to identify a Critical Event, Mean Time to Respond by Teams, and Mean Time to Resolve it.

An effective Critical Event Management software is an integrated, end-to-end process that enables organizations to significantly speed up responses to critical events and improve outcomes by mitigating or eliminating the impact of a threat, thereby improving the operations business resilience.