Tag: Critical Event Management

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Gain situational awareness and improve business resilience

Gain awareness - Gain situational awareness and improve business resilience

Situational awareness refers to an ability to derive, process, and analyze data related to critical events. To simply put, situational awareness tells you what is happening around you, how things change with time, and being relevant to situations as they appear. Enabling human experience or situational awareness is the most important approach in bridging the gap between life and death because it helps with logical output and more informed decision-making. As critical events are more frequent than ever, situational awareness can be the key to mitigate emergencies before they occur or impact your business.

When we fail to have a good understanding of a critical event or don’t have full situational awareness, poor decision making, inadequate communications and weak management of the crisis are likely results. It sounds straightforward in principle, but in reality, it requires defined processes, appropriate resources and practice. Often, many crisis management teams and enterprise command centers (ECC) overlook and result in last-minute scrambling to figure out the information management process and fully understand the incident and its impact.

But, the question is how capable are you to achieve situational awareness? If you don’t have insights into this, what ways can you try to seek it?

 

Challenges for a modern business to get hold of situational awareness

Did you ever think about what stops you from taking proactive action to mitigate the fast-evolving impacts of critical events? The answer is no. Reasons can range from information overload to the traditional approach of handling emergencies for organizations. They include,

Incessant attacks of critical events

Incidents are more frequent these days. Businesses are at stake as the synchronicity of different incidents makes it more complex to handle. With pandemics still raging through, one could never anticipate how it can complicate measures to handle critical events like natural disasters, man-made disasters, industrial threats such as IT incidents, or data breaches. Due to the evolving nature of these events, crisis response teams fail to leverage enough data from critical event endpoints, which is indispensable to build situational awareness.

Information overload

The digital world is full of DATA, DATA and DATA. Crisis Management teams often describe gathering situational awareness and managing that information during a crisis as like drinking out of a fire hose. How does one manage such a volume, velocity and variety of information?

A traditional approach to data handling

Most organizations still rely on an old infrastructure to analyze information wherein the crisis response team manually integrates data into a system. But they lack a comprehensive understanding to validate data, resulting in intelligence slipping through hands. These siloed systems add to more complexity to discern who and what are in harm’s way and delay informed decision making.

Inability to parse explosion of data

Data is generated in a massive volume. But, there is unstructured data more than ever business can draw immense value by deriving them. But, businesses using conventional systems are not capable of parsing this which can be valuable to tap into insights. In another way, it is tough for businesses to store a massive volume of unstructured data. As we gather data related to critical events, we can’t verify its accuracy because of its inconsistent nature and quality issues. However, by implementing the power of natural language processing or artificial intelligence, we can make findings more valuable for critical event management as they provide risk intelligence.

To build situational awareness, we need accurate data, not inconsistent data.

Sources of data to build situational awareness

To create situational awareness, we need to derive data from disparate sources. One thing is critical that manual data processing can ruin its approach. The comprehensiveness of relevant information related to specific locations or surroundings or assets in connection with the incident can be of immense value. So, we need to work with stakeholders and partners to gather validated information for complete visibility into situations. Demographic breakdown of data can help us make a visual representation of incidents and potential threats to people and assets and thus improve situational awareness. To add to this, data may include an existing emergency plan, a live feed from sensors, weather or traffic feed, or dynamic data like critical events. By integrating these data points into a system, organizations can build a common operating picture, simplifying the process of getting risk intelligence for ever-evolving emergencies and enhance decision-making.

Importance of visualization in critical event management

Leveraging the common operating picture is critical to resolving issues faster and preparing a more robust approach to handling future threats. Situational awareness solidifies the foundation of the common operating picture wherein emergency response teams can use technology to bring context to information and integrate it into a system. Using all datasets, we can visualize data or build an intuitive model that enhances understanding of critical events that change with time and necessitate emergency preparedness. Through comprehensive situational awareness, we can better visualize to allocate emergency help to priority areas well in advance so further damage to life or property can be avoided.

Situational Awareness is key to business resilience

Critical events undoubtedly restrict business operations. The ongoing COVID-19 has its impacts on the global economy as businesses had to pause and shift to new models of doing business. Besides, natural threats, cyberattacks, or any kind of disasters can aggravate supply chain disruptions, putting direct effects on its scalability or resilience. Having situational awareness into the evolving situations can better prepare your emergency response, which comprehensively helps in mitigating risks and encouraging business continuity.

Role of situational awareness in critical event management

As we discussed, situation awareness gives you an idea about what is going on around you, ways to predict things with time, and remain relevant to the changing environment. Critical event management gives your organization the fastest means to unify data by communicating with stakeholders or partners and make more informed decisions specific to emergencies. A CEM system eliminates the necessity of having so many tools to communicate, gather data, map risks, and mitigate risks in real-time. As the unified CEM brings you valuable data, you can easily incorporate them to create situational awareness, therefore making more informed decisions, speeding up the process of handling situations better.

Ways to achieve situational awareness

It is all about getting better ideas to respond to critical events more proactively. Situational awareness makes it easier to get insights into types of incidents and various approaches to deal with them. Since data is key, we need a more comprehensive system that collects data from even disparate sources and gives context too. Zsuite – a powerful CEM tool that enables organizations to gather the right information at the right time from the right source can provide comprehensive data to locate, assess, act, and analyze.

Zsuite features the most advanced tools that include unified communication tools with two-way communication and multichannel capabilities to help keep information consistent. Integrated with geofencing location tracking and sensors, Zsuite can scale with situations, provide contextual information to be relevant to your emergency handling workflows, and finally help react to mitigate critical events. So with the right data in hand, you can gain situational awareness by implementing the right method.

Values organizations can derive from situational awareness

Situational awareness enhances the ability to comprehend, react, and decide based on geographic context. Organizations can power up their emergency preparedness plan before any event occurring. This ability helps mitigate the crisis in a much lesser time, improves cost-savings, enhances overall productivity and efficiency while also generating revenues.

Handling critical events depends on situational awareness. And we can bring a more comprehensive approach to this dynamicity using the Zsuite CEM tool. It enhances data gathering, communication, visualization, and emergency response.

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ZSuite

How Zapoj Zsuite CEM Improves Business Resilience

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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.

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Zapoj CEM inspires an effortless return to work or school.

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Zapoj Critical Event Management or CEM strives to lessen the impact as aggravated by the rush to get back to the normal pattern of life as before. The COVID-19 pandemic is still unleashing its grudge with double the power to infect people and push them back to the standstill point.

Today, businesses, organizations, and schools are building new compliances so as to maintain new guidelines that elaborate on safety and precautionary measures to help reduce the spread of the infection. As people from these sectors are striving to reopen safely, they also need a powerful weapon to support the compliance requirements for monitoring vaccination and health status. Zapoj CEM orchestrates a network built on a powerful command center that uses risk intelligence, situational awareness, and epidemic capability in assisting the most crucial operational objectives every leader needs right at this time.

 

Fighting COVID-19 to achieve performance

Starting with schools, government organizations, and businesses- all they want is assurance for safety compliance, which must be well in place to keep everyone safe whosoever comes in contact with these establishments as well as ensuring employee wellness and health.

Integrated with the Epidemic tool, Zapoj CEM gives you a common operating picture through the Command Center. Its flexibility to pull in information in real-time helps you carry out COVID-19 tests and schedule vaccination for your employees.

If any potential exposure is found, you can take action well in advance, preventing your operations from being shut for a temporary period that can impact your productivity and scalability.

With COVID-19 testing, as well as vaccination, becoming more widespread, Zapoj with its expanded capability can ensure that you can easily cross-check with the vaccine status of individuals at your organizations and also track their health conditions in between the first and second dose and post-vaccination.

Two-way communication is an efficient way to build a database. Zapoj integrates into its alerting system- the power of geo-targeting capabilities that easily enables you to send map-based notifications to your employees, school children, and other officials by their specific geographic locations or zip codes if any vaccine or pandemic related emergency occurs. As you build up your database with contacts based on their locations, Zapoj CEM provides a faster way to draw a map on the command center and they appear as dots on the screen. During every step of the vaccine administration at work, if any emergency takes place, you can send out a targeted message without having to panic other people in the same facility. So, tracking is simply a message away, which is contextual and specific to people who really need it.

Customization is another great capability of Zapoj CEM which is flexible to tailor your message templates meant to target a specific group or skills at work locations. Individuals know who to reply back or ask a question when a certain query arises. Mass notifications here simplify sending and receiving messages end-to-end among large people, clarifying ambiguities, and laying the foundation that promotes a healthy work culture.

Moving forward, Zapoj is a CEM tool we need to strengthen the compliance to maintain vaccine management, supply chain accountability, and employee management.

Built with risk intelligence and visualization, Zapoj CEM relays information in real-time via its Command Center where you can verify which of your employees has been administered with the vaccines, essential vaccine results of recipients, and also health status, including fever, temperature among others.

As the vaccine is administered, the individual would receive an SMS that verifies its credibility. Besides this traditional method, Zapoj escalates messages in different regional languages and delivers via multi-channels including social media, voice calls, and even emails. It would be great that your organization can communicate in a flexible manner and encourage your people to share the information that has end-to-end data encryption, hence reducing the probability of rumor while building trust and credibility for your organization.

 

Contact tracing alerts

Now along with the vaccination, every data is crucial to keeping with the business resiliency.

As 100% vaccine efficacy is not established yet, the risks associated with vaccine side effects and resurgence of infection are highly likely. All crucial precautions- social distancing, health monitoring, reporting back ill healths, tracking victims- all remain unchanged for now. If we need to reopen, we must monitor every activity to avoid any cross-contamination of COVID-19 infections.

 

Zapoj CEM utilizes AI-based risk intelligence to ease the whole process of monitoring.

Offices, especially schools have tough managing sitting arrangements or routes critical to avoiding the high risk of exposure – close interactions or contaminations.

At the base of all things COVID-19, communication is crucial to mitigate interactions and avoid further risks. The reopening of the workplace or schools is putting emphasis on how we can track locations that are contaminated by a staff tested positive with the disease so that sanitation gets underway accurately and precisely.

Zapoj gives us dynamic capabilities of location awareness and visualization. Zapoj provides real-time monitoring of its people around a facility or within a building where contact contamination can become highly predominant. Given all possibilities, robust communication or contact tracing alerts are significantly getting information across to your people with ease and prevent them from being in touch with people who have been infected or come in contact with them.

We can achieve a broader level of visibility into which we can monitor movements, tracks, locations where employees, school children, or students enter. Based on the inputs we get from Zapoj, contact tracing alerts can be sent to people who have violated social distancing norms inadvertently. With transparent communication between our people, we can decide which places are sanitized or scheduled for sanitization. More so, we can design seating arrangements compliant with social distancing norms.

So when we communicate; managers, students, and employees will be able to know which locations they should avoid in the facility, reducing the probability of the spread of the disease, ensuring wellbeing for everyone while encouraging efficient performance at all levels.

Zapoj is a true leader in critical event management, which gives significant value to the organization leaders, institute authorities, and everyone who is keen to reopen its facilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Using its situational awareness, location tracking, contact tracing, and communication capabilities, we can achieve a high level of accuracy, performance, and efficiency that helps us move forward.

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Role of Critical Event Management for Vaccine Distribution

Role of critical event management for vaccine distribution

With COVID-19 vaccines ready and on track to be approved by government health departments, the next big hurdle remains: How will the vaccine reach billions of people?

Now Vaccine distribution is the key to saving lives and hastening economic recovery. Multiple industries will be responsible for various pieces of this urgent, herculean undertaking, but each can benefit from utilizing the Critical Event Management platform Although vaccine distribution is promising news, delivery of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses is a logistics challenge that’s unprecedented and distribution is being introduced at a time when Covid cases are increasing again with new emerging strains.

Zapoj can help stakeholders including state and local government, pharmaceutical manufacturers, retailers & pharmacies, logistics companies, and healthcare organizations to better understand and assess the operational landscape, respond to potential disruptions, communicate with their patients and employees, and more effectively fulfill their important role in vaccine distribution. Zapoj Critical Event Management Platform provides a common operating platform to manage critical events, redundant protection of people/systems/processes, and enables organizations to operate efficiently and effectively while mitigating disruptive forces.

Zapoj is uniquely positioned with its Critical Event Management and Collaboration hub platform in providing end-to-end digital solutions to all key stakeholders involved in  Vaccines distribution.

Here are some examples of how we work with stakeholders to ensure safety & continuity and operational efficiency with vaccine distribution plan :

  1. Enable the government and authorized organizations to monitor the vaccine supply chain, and any associated risks (e.g. disruptive forces including weather, civil unrest).
  2. Provide detailed and the latest vaccine distribution information and visualization into potential supply chain disruptions, including alerts from Cold Chain sensors to support risk alerts from vaccine supply chain distribution logistics, and manage last-mile supply chain integrity.
  3. Better understand and assess the operational landscape and respond to potential disruptions; compile project-specific assets into CEM including supply routes, critical infrastructure e.g. cold storage facilities, and points of distribution.
  4. Integrated Contact Management helps drive vaccine adoption and distribution providing hyper-focused contact details to reach vulnerable and underserved populations or those that haven’t opted in to receive notifications.
  5. Provide detailed analytics and precise geo-targeted Notifications for state-wide or country-wide mass notifications updating employees or citizens about locations for vaccinations or updates/changes to locations and or schedules, Follow up polling and wellness checks, dosage tracking, i.e. when individuals should take first and the second dose, providing automated and privacy-sensitive alerts.
  6. With the capabilities of the COVID-19 vaccine tracker, monitoring test results for potential adverse reactions to the vaccine as people report them will be twice as easy.
  7. Establish Crisis Communications and collaborations among various frontline workers via chat, web conferencing, secure file drive, task management in facilitating efficient implementations of various supply chain logistics in COVID-19 response vaccine distribution management without any hassles.
  8. Secure clinical communications for Care team members and while providing telehealth for Wellness checks, medical prescriptions, nutrition counseling, Mental health counseling.

To know more about Zapoj, reach us at contactus@zapoj.com

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Unified Comms and Collab Scale Recovery in Critical Events

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We know critical events do not limit to a specific domain and it impacts everything at large. Business leaders thus have been identifying business resilience efforts for familiar critical events that include terrorisms, natural disasters, pandemics, telecom outages, cyberattacks, data breaches, server downtime, and many more other possible scenarios. Despite business leaders have preparedness strategies, a different kind of threat environment may impact their efforts to keep up with business continuity and resilience.

Even though you forecast threats and unleash the best efforts, your attempts for business resilience may not work to the fullest when impacted by uncertain pandemics like COVID-19. For the worst-case scenario, the synchronicity of COVID-19 converges and influences other critical events to appear stern and complicated to handle for the world. That was the reason why businesses around the world have incurred losses and still facing hurdles. This is the biggest picture of critical events which is integral to one another.

However, when we talk about a critical event, it does not broadly relate to the high impact volcanic eruption, flood, or anything else. It may refer to incidents that affect your operation at the initial stage.

Be it COVID like critical events or small events, they lead to one common consequence- financial losses, a threat to life, and also reputation damage.

Crisis communication and collaboration that is flexible, scalable, and transparent can give business leaders the speed and power to address challenges much before they appear and impact the business.

In essence, what today’s business leaders need is a crisis communication and collaboration tool to facilitate a critical event management plan with powerful capabilities including multi-modal delivery, two-way communications to coordinate with everyone involved while keeping every stakeholder informed.

Zapoj enables powerful communication and collaboration during critical events and gives all stakeholders the opportunity to work better together towards running initial response, performing the right task, restoring incidents, and continuing business operations.

 

Zapoj architecting crisis communications for your organizations

Thousands of best possible case scenarios related to critical events may appear for your business. If we imagine a conventional fire in your office, what would be the first step of your action plan? Owing to this scenario, Zapoj has tools and features that you can use to implement better preparedness efforts. Now, how should business leaders accomplish their efforts? Let’s deep dive into it.

 

Building relevant plans and policies

As part of your preparedness effort, you should have a plan that includes everything about handling emergency responses, assessing risks, notifying stakeholders to follow-up recovery. Without you having a plan, you play around with guesswork and expect everyone should be aware of their respective responsibility and recovery preparedness. But, this strategy does not work and brings more risks than you could imagine. Be more proactive and rather than just hoping for the best thing to happen, you must have critical event management or a unified communication tool platform – Zapoj, that takes out anticipation and moves you forward to a better solution.

Using task management in Zapoj, you can have your critical event management plans and policies ready and make them accessible to every stakeholder so that they can be aware of specific tasks to be performed during the critical event. Supported by two-way communications, when any critical event occurs, business leaders can make informed decisions and keep everyone informed about what is currently happening internally in the organization and future course of action. Any individual at risk can be reached immediately using emergency notifications, and thus ensuring their safety at future events too.

Business continuity plans can be also be kept in a unified drive, making it easily accessible too for everyone in the organization. No matter where you are, anyone in your team can easily get hold of important information from the drive and share it between team members. Accelerating engagement is twice as effective during critical events.

 

Using predefined templates

During critical events, cognitive intelligence stops working impeding communications to flow at normal speed. In about 80% of cases, figuring out what to communicate becomes tough. Zapoj allows you to build critical communication templates in advance and restore them either in drive or CEM platform.

These templates are error-free and tailored to specific incidents that can escalate on detecting specific emergencies and reach the right person to respond at the right time from CEM. As is with drive, a responder can shuffle through drive and send informative notifications to your employees.  With contextual and clear messages, you communicate in less than predictable time, reduce response time to act, run rescue operations, and keep your employees safe.

 

Targeting personnel by locations

Zapoj can let you build a database or contact center with updated employee information with proper contact numbers, email addresses, residential addresses, and other core information.

 

During any critical events, Zapoj mass notifications can target employees using visual geographic maps or dynamic targeting such as IP addresses so that operator can easily reach the person to alert him or her. The workflows of these emergency notifications will followup when missed the initial alert. Thus, Zapoj brings the flexibility of two-way communication that keeps flowing until the emergency message is acknowledged.

 

Collaborating through the multi-channel delivery pathway

Improving response time during crises is the ultimate goal of Zapoj that keeps people engaged in a fantastic way. Its multi-channel notification delivery pathway is consistent across all channels while maintaining the significance of messages at any condition. A responder can automate any critical notifications on devices like social media, phone, desktop, pager, and others. Regardless of where your people are, messages in the form of voice calls, SMS, emails, social media messages can reach them. So, every time you send, you can ensure your messages are correct and contextual so as to avoid confusion and panic while helping mitigate the business risks with immediate effect.

With Zapoj, we can expect no delay can impede our effort to restore critical event impacts and resume normalcy.

Zapoj provides a scalable solution with its multidimensional features- mass notifications, emergency alerting, drive, task management, IT alerting , and more to facilitate relentless recovery efforts for critical events. If you want a rapid recovery process, Zapoj is the tool that provides you the freedom to help your people stay informed and safe.

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Why Critical Event Management Is Important For Your Business?

How CEM improves Organizational Resilience

Critical events are unpredictable. But, business leaders are accountable for managing unforeseeable critical events which are apparent in day-to-day operations.

Workplace violence, IT outages, cyber threats, natural disasters, extreme weather, terror attacks, riots, geopolitical crises, and others are twice as more relevant at the present time. Unfortunately, any of these critical events can be threatening to the supply chain operations as it can delay raw material delivery, product manufacturing, on-time delivery to customers, and finally impact the user experience. Also, the risk of business disruption is much higher.

 

Critical Event Threats To Your Business Continuity

Businesses can be at risk every day, any time. Critical events can be disruptive when they take shape as extreme weather like storms or cyclones, and earthquakes, floods, pandemics to name a few. These are ceaseless disruptions and omnipresent at any point in time.

For organizations looking to combat critical event threats, using tools that lack an end-to-end recovery process and include fewer resources can impede their business recovery strategies. Hence, risk management professionals are unable to map potential business threats and have enough time to react to them. As a result, the failure gives rise to uncertainties and you cannot avoid the negative impacts of critical events.

The Global Risks Report 2020 released by the World Economic Forum raised concerns about growing critical threats to humans as well as businesses. The report also sheds light on the top five risks in the future.

So many glaring critical threats last year or previous years put a huge financial strain on businesses.

  • COVID alone resulted in $29 billion in lost revenues.
  • An estimated loss of Cyclone Amphan was $130 million.
  • Climate and weather incurred losses of $1 billion during 2019.
  • According to Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is about to add to losses of up to $6 trillion in 2021 and for wrong reasons, small businesses are the greatest target. Also, cybercrime to cost the world$10.5 trillion by 2025.

Apart from financial losses, there are more risks associated with critical events. These include


The nature of events can be anything, but if they impact your business and assets, they are critical and you must be equipped with the right CEM tool to satisfy your goal. Critical Event Management provides a unified, automated, and collaborative tool to take control of future critical events well in advance.

Experts believe that Critical Event Management can come to the rescue of all of these emergencies or even small events. An emergency tool that gives you immediate access to form critical communication and automate unified responses to emergencies is the most effective critical management tool for every business irrespective of its size. Keeping your people informed and safe at every step of critical events is the best way to keep your business running and avoid losses.

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Fixing the biggest problem with vaccine outreach management

The Biggest problem with vaccine

From vaccines to vaccination- this is the most critical stage of making our community safe and disease-free from COVID-19 attacks. We are heading to putting into effective large-scale vaccination plans devised to make corona vaccine outreach robust and fast for everyone. But, the way to the COVID-19 vaccination program is not so smooth. From the transit, stocking points to administration, it has challenges to overcome.

The COVID-19 aggravated by the new strains, already has misinformation, lack of awareness, and knowledge surfacing around, making people feel panicked, intimidated, and doubtful about its vaccination program’s efficacy.

The fact is every step of the distribution journey needs to be fact-filled with a careful approach of making it accessible to everyone, especially those who need them on the highest priority basis.

In achieving success in the vaccination program, all we need is to educate everyone involved in the process. To make a more robust, transparent distribution strategy, we must build an interconnected system between public and distribution centers- primary health centers and community health centers to help people access a vaccination effortlessly and with ease.

Unified critical communication solutions or critical event management can be the right tool in ensuring the vaccination program is on the right path and achieves its goals at large.

Zapoj- Finding Solutions to corona vaccine outreach management problems

 

Locations for vaccinations/updates/ schedules/ changes to locations

Cold chain storage ensures the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines. Right at this moment, there are limited resources available that can meet this demand. To prevent a COVID-19 outbreak, we need to discover accurate and precise geographic routes consistent with vaccine preservation norms. Additionally, far-flung and highly densely populated communities where power supply and transportations are scarce can create hurdles to the whole vaccination program. Healthcare facilities or public healthcare systems can face critical issues with location identification and updating their people about vaccine schedules.

Zapoj CEM or Critical Event Management that features two-way communication and mass notifications can address all of these challenges.

  • It gives you the ability to use a built-in Geographic Information System or GIS driven by location intelligence. You can determine your routes to key locations where vaccines must be delivered and preserved for communities lacking proper immunization infrastructure.
  • Location intelligence also helps your community find available COVID-19 vaccine or testing centers.
  • As you get your communities to sign up for Zapoj, you can establish a two-way communication network. This is the fastest and accurate way of sending and receiving updates about COVID-19 vaccines.
  • Peer-to-peer communication helps you determine stock availability and plan schedules with a new batch of the vaccine.
  • You can notify the next schedules of vaccine administration too.

 

Reminder notifications for the first and second dose

Dosage tracking is critical to ensuring that the first and second doses have been administered successfully. With communities lacking proper resources to keep check with vaccination status, there is a high risk for government resources, effort, and plans being wasted.

Reminder notifications can easily communicate the status of doses. Zapoj makes sending reminder notifications and sensitive alerts safe and effective.

 

  • As individuals sign up for notifications, Zapoj accelerates the transit of mass notifications or alerts via SMS, email, phone call,  web, and even an app.
  • You can increase awareness for signup notifications by promoting them on social media, media, and local networks. Keep your local community updated about the latest happenings around vaccinations.
  • Zapoj can be best used to create time slots for appointments and send reminders for the first doses.
  • Two-way notifications help public health, pharmacists, clinicians, and others verify vaccination scheduling for the second dose.
  • Public health departments can better manage two administrations of vaccinations to ensure optimal efficacy. The reminder strategy works better here. They can allocate vaccines and communicate in real-time if any changes in schedules occur.

 

Follow up polling and wellness checks

The government does not have the infrastructure and trained workforce to reach every part of the location and carry out the wellness checks to assess health status post-vaccination. However, failure to address this critical part of the job may hit back the strategy.

Using integrated mass notification or alerting systems, medical volunteers, or public health departments can bolster monitoring on the vaccination outreach.


  • Everyone can communicate their health status and get the ability to keep track of the outcomes of the vaccination program.
  • Based on the data collected via Zapoj, you can schedule follow-up and wellness checks for consumers.
  • It is fast and easy to connect with families and friends who share their experiences with vaccinations.
  • This integrated system helps your community determine their eligibility for the program.

Rumor control to targeted neighborhoods

Misinformation has a mixed public reaction on the efficacy and safety of the vaccines, hence hesitancy can impact vaccine outreach management or coverage efforts.

Zapoj CEM helps health and human services provide accurate information to its people and educate them on a core level.

Zapoj CEM role during vaccine distribution includes

  • Build a collaboration platform where information about vaccination and reporting can be shared among the health departments.
  • Deliver accurate information to your people and eliminate ambiguity about the effectiveness of vaccination.
  • Every clinician or medical facility can provide relevant data to notify its people of the availability of vaccines and tell them where to go for vaccinations.

 

Vaccine efficacy polling or symptoms post-vaccine polling

We need a granular level update about how the vaccination has effectively worked so far. A country, which is overly crowded can’t meet this requirement and get assessment right per head. The fact is many backward countries don’t own the right tools or resources that can ease the process of vaccination polling.

Mass notifications give public health departments an opportunity to simplify this critical process. Zapoj helps you connect with the community at dispersed locations and capture feedback in real-time using its geo-targeted notifications.

  • Health departments can track people to uncover any potential or adverse risk associated with the vaccines.
  • Auto-escalation messaging connects with people at a specified interval and collects accurate information that determines the efficacy of the post-immunization program.

 

Breaking language barrier 

Different people speak different languages, making it tough for health authorities to establish an easy two-way communication exchange.  Lack of context can add more ambiguity and confusion for people who don’t understand the government message about vaccination.

But, Zapoj has multi-lingual messaging capabilities that simplify the understanding of critical information rapidly and easily.

  • You can get your community a flexible and comfortable way to communicate and exchange. It gives everyone the ability to speak or text in any language they prefer.
  • This input can be useful to build a national database that gives access to vaccine monitoring and helps with clinical assessment.
  • All health authorities can identify and communicate the vaccine requirements on a priority basis.

Zapoj’s Mass Notifications have a powerful tool with multi-lingual features that can simplify understanding, help receive accurate information, and make informed decisions. Zapoj goes hand-in-hand and provides complete support in making Coronavirus Vaccine Outreach a success.

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ZSuite

Zsuite – A Comprehensive Platform for Critical Event Management

An All-In-One Critical Event Management Solution

Between rising security risks, natural disasters, climate change, business application slowdowns, IT outages, and unpredictable man-made threats. it’s not a question of whether, but when, a serious security or performance issue with your digital or physical infrastructure will endanger the health of your business or the communities you serve. The results can be immediate and devastating. For a business, they may include lost revenue, reduced employee productivity, a drop in share price, regulatory fines, and reduced customer satisfaction and retention. For a public safety agency or a health care provider, the stakes can be life or death if a doctor or nurse fails to receive an urgent order, or the public isn’t notified of an emergency evacuation.

The key to successfully managing incidents. both crisis and day-to-day operational incidents, revolve around making informed decisions and having the visibility to communicate quickly and effectively. Zapoj CEM Zsuite platform provides a robust suite of services to empower better decisions throughout the incident lifecycle to protect your most important assets.

The Zapoj Critical Event Management Platform is built on the most secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure with multiple layers of redundancy to provide real-time threat detection, situational awareness,  integrated response, and collaboration capabilities all with a single, enterprise-wide view.

Built on top of these core functionalities, Zapoj  CEM Suite aka Zsuite provides flexible services to address specific client risk intelligence and critical communication needs and use cases. These services include Visual Risk Intelligence, Crisis Management, Mass Notification, Major Incident Management, IT Event Altering, and Staff Scheduling.

Zapoj CEM framework can be used across many industries to address emergencies. Harnessing thousands of data from various emergency sites, Zapoj CEM identifies the degree of threats to the organization, assets, people, and supply chain depending on its locations. All this necessitates the escalation of automated response preparedness plans as relevant to company policy and compliance meant to analyze blocks and mitigate future risks as well as improve business efficiency.

 

How it works

Zapoj Zsuite brings together all required services for organization Security, Incident Command Operators, IT Operations Teams and Risk Management professional to  Discover Impacted Assets (People, IT Systems, Supply Chain, etc), Take Action in Initiating Response Teams using Automated Workflows, Collaborative tools such as Chat, Video / Audio Conferencing to keep all stakeholders on the same page, Examine Team Responses, escalations, and overall performance and Finally Analyze Performance of Teams in handling risks.

Our approach to Critical Event Management enables organizations to quickly and reliably:

  • Increase visibility into global ware threats
  • Reduce or automate the time to initiate action
  • Communicate and collaborate over Chat, Conferences, share documents
  • Minimize the cost to restore normal operations
  • Gain a common operating picture across the organization

Increase visibility into global wide threats and common operating pictures

Via a single, interactive console, users get a birds-eye geographical view of the state of the organization in real-time. Zsuite Visual Risk intelligence delivers the most accurate information in real time to key decision makers by providing them with simultaneous visibility and interactivity to gain a complete and shared boots-on-the-ground understanding of critical events your organization faces so that operations can effectively manage day- to-day challenges and respond to disasters when they arise.

Reduce or automate the time to initiate action

As the situation changes, Visual Risk intelligence allows you to alert crisis response teams and key stakeholders through integration with incident communications and mass notification. Through better risk preparedness, organizations can be more proactive when dealing with threats. This can help them mitigate or avoid the impact altogether. This can result in avoidance of costs that might include shutdowns, fines, loss or damaged inventory and even loss of life.

 

Communicate and collaborate over Chat , Conferences, share documents

From Zapoj workspaces, crisis teams can coordinate all response activities, teams and resources to accelerate recovery times and maintain command and control when crises evolve into unanticipated scenarios. With all stakeholders – from responders in the field to executives in the boardroom – working from a common operating picture, you will never have to worry that your response plans are not getting executed or tear yourself away from mission critical activities to provide a status update.

 

Plan and ready for any critical event

Every day, operational issues impact productivity and revenue, cause production slowdowns, delay responses to time-sensitive issues, and require tracking for compliance purposes. To ensure a quick response and fast resolution, it is critical to follow the correct procedure and include the information required for each incident type. The incident has a prescribed set of processes that must be followed in order to efficiently resume regular operations, notify the correct internal and external stakeholders and comply with organizational and industry guidelines.

With form driven and highly customized templates for Incident Management and Mass Communications, can be configured to fit the needs of any organization or government agency with customizable variables and a separate incident response plan by location, line of business, or facility. Multi-step workflow that prompts users to select the correct incident type.

Data driven analysis for operation business resilience

Analytics provides incident response trends which are available by group, time or type to help continuously improve processes and assist managers with resource planning and optimizing response times and SLAs. With interactive response timeline monitoring, and early warnings, businesses can proactively ensure adherence to the organizational service level objectives.


Distinguishing Features of Zapoj CEM

Zapoj Critical Event Management brings several innovative and advantageous concepts to the management of operational resilience

  • The convergence advantage: merging the disciplines of security, BC/DR, and IT ops into a single model
  • The process advantage: elevating these disciplines to a process view, useful as an integration and measurement framework
  • The Maturity advantage: provides a foundation for practical institutionalization of practices—critical for retaining these practices under times of stress
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ZSuite

101 of Critical Event Management and Why Your Organization Needs It

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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.

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ZSuite

Importance of Critical Event Management to Business

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Building organizational resilience

In 2021, business operational resilience is the utmost important aspect of worldwide business, be it small or global enterprises and no matter what part of the world they operate from. Defined as the emergent property of an organization exhibited when it continues to carry out its mission after disruption, that does not push it beyond its operational limit. Never in modern history, organizations have taken serious thought and investment in making their business operations resilient to disruptions. The organization meets its overall mission only when every individual high-value service in the organization meets its mission. Each service constitutes people, information, technology, and facilities – a critical event can disrupt any one of them impacting the service and eventually overall organization mission.

A Critical Event can be anything that causes a business disruption, from operational disruptions like IT outages and supply chain disruptions to catastrophic man-made events like active shooters or natural events like earthquakes or severe weather or Pandemic like Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19). In fact, these events have been on the rise for the last 10 years, on any given day some part of the world has always had some critical event impacting Business in that area. With a deeply interconnected Global Economy, the impact of Business on one side of the world can cause business disruptions all across the world, even if they were not directly exposed to Critical Events. The cost of inaction or poor preparation remains steep, results in lost productivity, eroded corporate reputation, instability in supply chain management, and lowered revenue.

In highly complex worldwide risk events, reliance on humans to collect data, connect modules, interpret threat data is impossible to manually visualize, track and process all information affecting your organization. Without technology, you cannot be proactive in mitigating the risks and impacts;  at best one would just react. Unfortunately, many organizations still rely on manual processes of collecting data, trying to implement business continuity based on a very narrowed understanding. This is where Critical Event Management (CEM) comes in handy in helping various roles in an organization such as security, operations, risk management, crisis management, and IT professionals to be proactive than reactive during critical events.

This guide will help you better understand, How CEM Works, How it helps business, How to initiate the CEM strategy, and finally how to quantify business resilience.

How_CEM_Works?

How CEM Works

Critical Event management addresses both the strategic side of business resilience which starts with identifying business risks, business continuity planning, forming crisis management teams, and the tactical part of implementing business continuity, which starts with situation awareness of global risk events, assess which assets get impacted, launches response teams to implement business continuity plans, crisis communications, response team collaborations, and post-mortem analytics. Zapoj Critical Event Management product- Zsuite is an AI-powered comprehensive end-to-end critical event management platform that enables organizations to predict, act, orchestrate, communicate and collaborate during any critical disruptions to business operations.

 

Following are the 5 pillars of Critical Event Management

  • Risk Intelligence Risk intelligence provides thousands of data feeds across weather, protests, social media, dark web, and hyper-local safety feeds to curate, filter, and categorizes risk events. Data is visually organized to easily understand risk event location, type of risk, data source, and severity so that security teams can take a faster response to threats in order to avoid false positives and make better decisions.
  • Correlation of assets and threats CEM software aligns risk events to assets using a dynamic correlation engine that combines static location, expected location, and last known location of people and assets. CEM can take this a step further by considering time elements to determine who or what is impacted by threats, in order to reach them faster and more decisively.
  • Orchestration of business continuity plans and incident management Automated workflows ensure that even when you or your team is not watching for threats, the system is going to do for you. SOPs, communications, and action plans can be automated and orchestrated during a crisis in order to speed up response and ensure that the appropriate action is taken for a particular threat.
  • Unified communications and collaboration The unified communications component of the critical event management system allows front-line workers to collaborate and communicate via chat rooms, web conference war rooms, securely share relevant documents and update task status.
  • Data-driven analytics With CEM, metrics are built-in throughout the process to ensure the right action is taken by the right people, at the right time, and to understand how effective actions implemented were and how you can do better in the future.

How CEM Adds Value to your Organization

  • Reduce losses from business interruption.
  • Lowered costs from IT downtime.
  • Decreased losses from property damage.
  • Averted costs of lost employee productivity.
  • Global risk events situation awareness and their impact on business operations.
  • Increased security team productivity through freed up time for higher-value tasks

 

How to Initiate the CEM in your organization

  • Leadership Initiative Build alliances across the chief security officer (CSO), chief information security officer (CISO), and chief information officer (CIO) at the very least. Combining the experience, insights, and intelligence from across the organization makes it possible to quickly understand the root cause of an event and ensures a rapid response and operational continuity.
  • Identify key assets and risk areas During every event, a resilient organization will know where employees, travelers, visitors, offices, manufacturing facilities, and other critical assets are located. It’s also critical to know how they are interconnected and the dependencies between them. Beyond knowing the location and interdependencies, organizations also need an idea of how much it will cost if these assets are impacted by an event. For instance, perhaps a critical business application goes down resulting in thousands of dollars in losses every minute. It’s important to calculate losses based on the overall use case, such as how many employees are going to be impacted.
  • Risk Intelligence data sources It’s time to pull all of your risk information together into one place to streamline your threat assessment process. Align sources, information, and evaluate the risks and the impact to your organization across five key asset types: People, Buildings, IT Systems, Supply Chain, and Brand/Reputation. Your data sources should be vetted and verified, involving geo-targeted intelligence related to weather, terrorism, and other potential disruptions. Verified sources and analysis eliminate the noise and enable you to generate the most impactful information while eliminating false positives.
  • Communication and Training The primary goal of business continuity planning is to efficiently restore operations through predetermined, systematic processes and procedures. However, in order to minimize the impacts and rapidly respond to operational hindrances, companies must ensure business continuity communication methods and procedures are clearly defined and functional. Communication planning is an intricate part of preparedness and any continuity process. Clear and effective communication channels must remain available in order to disseminate information to employees, assess and relay damage, and coordinate a recovery strategy.

 

How to quantity CEM outcomes

If you can’t measure something you can’t improve it, this is applicable to business resilience also. Since CEM is all about improving the business resilience of organizations, the capability maturity model in place quantifies where organizations stand now, identifies gaps, assesses what needs to be done to improve it, provides a timeline for improvements, and tracks the progress with data-driven metrics. CEM-CMM positions operational resilience in a process improvement view. Let’s talk about CEM capability maturity model stages

 

  1. Adhoc Stage:  As part of organizational Security –  Business continuity , Crisis Management and IT ops are silo managed with individual tools and processes. No CEM software is used to implement, all tasks are manual and paper based, teams have limited knowledge of important assets for successful business operations. At this stage any business operations disruption response is slow , uncoordinated ,unstructured, eventually leading to revenue loss and brand value at stake.
  2. Reactive stage: At reactive stage organizations would have started using basic CEM technologies like emergency notifications, aligned with all teams responsible to implement Business continuity and crisis management under CEM practice. Assets (People, Facilities, supply chain , IT infra and services and Information) needed for business services to meet their goals are defined as well . But identification of risks and correlation of assets is still a manual human task. Technology is used only to alert response teams and the implementation scope is still at the departmental level.
  3. Managed stage: At this stage organizations have taken CEM seriously, more and more business units started implementing CEM strategies. Most importantly end to end CEM software is used to replace manual operations with automated risk identifying but the limited correlation with assets, alerts are multi-channeled with escalations and audits at every stage.
  4. Proactive stage: At this stage organizations are matured with CEM and implemented best practices for all business services. All identified risk operations are automatically correlated with assets and alerts are sent based on staff schedules. Mobile devices are used to send alerts based on context and location awareness.
  5. Optimized Stage: At this stage organizations should have implemented CEM across organization wide with dynamic altering , automation with orchestration , data driven analytics to understand gaps and continuous improvement.