COVID-19 Has Highlighted The Need For Increasing Mobility In Critical Event Management Solutions

COVID-19 Has Highlighted The Need For Increasing Mobility In Critical Event Management Solutions

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how quickly situations can escalate to unsustainable levels and how ultimately unprepared most firms around the world were to handle a situation of this magnitude. Business continuity plans are being revaluated worldwide and firms are scrambling to identify ways to shore up business resilience. An essential piece of ensuring business resilience is the ability to effectively respond to a crisis, communicate with the workforce and manage corrective action. Being able to communicate with workers about a crisis happening in real-time makes it easier for firms to protect their workers and ensure operation are maintained to the highest degree possible. To further exacerbate this problem, todays working environment has become increasingly remote while still keeping the onus on firms to protect their workers.

Luckily, we live in a society that more digitally connected than ever before. Most people now have a mobile device and many workplaces allow workers to have personal or company-issued mobile devices during the course of their work. In the latest Verdantix global survey, 66% of the 301 respondents planned to use EHS mobile applications within their operations. Vendors like Everbridge, Onsolve, AlertMedia and Regroup have long leveraged mobile devices for mass notification of workers in the office and field get notified during emergency events. Now vendors are pushing the envelope on how to empower their front workers, remote management and emergency responders.

For example, on March 1^st, 2021 critical event management (CEM) vendor Everbridge released its ManageBridge App, which allows teams to manage a critical event on the mobile devices with oversight on task lists, incidents, documents, notes, and event updates. Now users in the field will have more control to manage the full critical event lifecycle and better protect their workforce and operations. Firms will increasingly look towards critical event management solution vendors to future-proof themselves from black swan events and increasing mobility in these solutions will create an additional layer of protection for firms to rely on.