VTA
A transportation authority ensures the operational efficiency, safety, and security of over 3 million rides each month with Everbridge.
Serving 15 Silicon Valley cities and major high-tech companies like eBay, Google, Cisco, Yahoo, and Adobe, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) focuses on quality of service and customer safety, operating over 99% of scheduled service in 2009. Beginning with 50 buses in serious need of upgrades and repair in 1972, VTA now operates a fleet of more than 500 bus and rail vehicles, provides more than 3 million rides a month, covers 326 square miles of urbanized area, and has been setting industry benchmarks in accessibility, sustainability, and reliability of service.
Challenges
With thousands of employees striving to meet the vital transportation needs of an entire region, VTA’s incident notification requirements go far beyond preparing for the next major earthquake or tsunami. From system outages to the dispatch of work crews, VTA faces daily challenges that require targeted communication across the organization.
- Difficulty in efficiently reaching all personnel. Whether responding to a routine operational incident or life-threatening emergency, VTA’s control center must have the ability to contact employees and contractors across the organization, as well as elected officials and community stakeholders. Some may only be reached via email, others by mobile phone, while others by SMS text or pager. This disparity led to a lengthy and unreliable process, requiring countless hours and precious resources to administer.
- Non-targeted notifications desensitize message recipients. VTA’s former system of sending notifications via an email distribution list in Outlook eroded the perceived message importance and relevance among recipients.
- Workers’ Union mandates stringent employee data privacy requirements. The Workers’ Unions are highly protective of employees’ personal contact information and required VTA to ensure complete data privacy for their constituents.
- Establishing employee accountability and availability. A simple email system is not capable of polling employees for their safety and whereabouts, consolidating this information, and providing management with a quick snapshot in times of crisis for effective decision-making.
- System reliability. In a regional incident or outage, former processes were reliant upon premise-based email systems, exposing the organization to a glaring single point of failure.
Solution
Not all incidents are the same. When selecting an incident notification provider, VTA sought a partner with expertise in operational notifications, which directly impacts efficiencies and productivity, in addition to best-of-breed capabilities in emergency notifications, essential to the safety of passengers and personnel. After a thorough RFP process, Everbridge was selected to provide the Everbridge MatrixTM and Everbridge Aware® solutions for use across the organization.
“…In addition to companywide, critical incident
communications, VTA is excited to be using the Everbridge Matrix solution
to reduce Operations Center Controller workload by dispatching daily operational incident messages to Rail, Bus, and Facility managers. We selected Everbridge because of its industryleading, reliable, and innovative control center operations and emergency notification applications, as
well as its successful track record delivering projects to local, state, and federal government agencies.”
– Mike Hursh, Deputy Director, Maintenance and Security
Operational Notifications
Everbridge Matrix provides an easy-to-use interface specifically tailored for the control center environment. Control center staff simply select an incident type, location, and severity level from drop-down lists. Everbridge Matrix converts the inputs into custom notifications based on predetermined scenarios, notifying the appropriate teams immediately.
- Quicker, more accurate incident response through process automation. Everbridge Matrix enables VTA to automate its operational incident response processes. VTA’s control center operators can quickly and accurately send notifications, based on pre-defined notification procedures, speeding response time and eliminating human error.
- Improved productivity of the Control Center and Operations. Everbridge Matrix knows who to contact and what to tell them based on VTA’s procedures, allowing key personnel to focus on management and resolution of the incident.
Emergency Notifications
For unique, emergency situations that threaten business continuity and life safety, VTA also employs the Everbridge Aware solution.
- Targeted notifications on the fly. VTA uses Everbridge Aware to target specific groups or individuals, including employees with specific job functions or residing within a particular geographic region.
- Improved employee accountability through polling and remote roll-calling. Everbridge Aware allows VTA to alert teams in emergency situations, confirm the safety and whereabouts of employees, initiate emergency action conference calls, and more, allowing management to keep a pulse on the entire organization, even in times of crises.
- Union employee notifications while addressing data privacy concerns. Everbridge worked directly with Workers’ Union stewards to develop a process to collect the contact information necessary to keep workers safe in a crisis while ensuring complete data privacy for their constituents.
Usage Highlight
VTA’s former emergency notification system consisted of an email distribution list to 160 key personnel who received notifications of all types, from the routine to the most critical. Some VTA staff asked if an off-premise, dedicated notification system was truly necessary … that is, until their email system crashed and was inoperable.
VTA leveraged Everbridge Aware to notify all personnel of the system failure and provide updates as the problem was resolved, creating a secure channel for continued communication throughout the outage.
“We received very positive reviews from our message recipients,” said Mike Hursh, VTA’s Deputy Director for Maintenance and Security. “This outage demonstrated precisely why organizations must have an independent, off-premise incident notification solution.”
