APL Logistics took emergency alerting from hours to seconds with Everbridge

APL Logistics is an international logistics organization responsible for ensuring the safety of its people and assets across the globe. In this interview with Tony Chavez, their Director of Security, he discusses how Everbridge helps APL effectively manage critical events from start to finish.

[00:07.3]
Our organization is an international logistics organization, and we have several risks, going on at any time around the globe. And a system like Everbridge helps us really manage critical events from start to finish. It allows us to become aware of specific risk events that are impactful to our business in a quick and efficient manner and allows us to mitigate risks as they come up to help minimize, the damage for our business operations.

[00:32.5]
A few months ago in the California wildfires, a large contingent of our workforce in the United States is remote, and we actually had, nine employees within not only the fire zone, but within the actual evacuation zone, and it really helped us, give context to the event as far as what impact or what assets were impacted by the event, and helped us manage our employees, facilitate their evacuation and further follow up as, we needed with HR and the different business units that needed to be involved with real time intelligence so that we could act accordingly with the best information on hand at any given time.

[01:08.1]
Yeah, so prior to bringing Everbridge on, we really had no automated way to, connect our assets to a particular risk event. So oftentimes it was me, getting open source intelligence through open source intelligence platforms, and then looking at our HR system and going into, you know, like a Google Maps type thing manually for each individual employee and trying to connect a specific coordinate to that event.

[01:36.7]
But it took, you know, literally what took two hours before, can now be done within a matter of seconds, and we can get the communication out to the folks who are impacted and provide our executive staff with a really quick summary of what impact the specific risk event has, on not only our facilities and operations, but also our people as well.

[01:58.0]
Our team is very, lean by design, and with Everbridge, we’ve been able to utilize the CEM orchestration and workflows very heavily within our environment to really automate a lot of the response processes and get our response going immediately once an event kicks off.

[02:13.6]
And that’s really allowed us to become very efficient, and again, manage the disruptions to any of our operations or impacts on our assets or people. Say, you know, a lot of times the, especially in the industry that I’m in, I’m the Head of Security for the organization and the traditional mindset has been to kind of throw personnel, you know, at problems and really continue those manual processes.

[02:37.4]
What I would say is look to tools like Everbridge to automate as many processes as you can to make your current workforce not only more capable, but more efficient. And with that you can also add capabilities to your program that you probably never imagined because you’re able to free up a lot of the manual workloads that your employees were doing prior to implementation.

[02:56.8]
And then the other piece, that I would add to that is try to incorporate as much data as you can, so not only Everbridge data, but also integrate your own data to give you more context around the impact that specific events are having. Not only your facilities, productivity, but also a financial impact as well.

[03:14.9]
If you can connect it to like your SAP type system or whatever system you use for finances as well. It’s been very impactful to see not only the effect on our current operations, but the financial impact that it could have long term as well.