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Insights from Amazon Logistics & Whole Foods Market on preparing for severe weather events

Discover the full business value of critical event management

Although the benefits of deploying Critical Event Management (CEM) are becoming widely accepted, organizations can often struggle to demonstrate the tangible ROI to their key stakeholders, and can face an uphill battle when it comes to securing budget.  

So, is it possible to put a value on Critical Event Management? To answer this question, Everbridge commissioned global market research firm, Forrester Consulting, to conduct an updated Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) Study, and examine the return on investment enterprises realized by deploying Everbridge’s CEM platform.

To understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed six representatives from four organizations with experience using CEM. For the purposes of the study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization that is a global manufacturing firm with $16 billion in revenue and 30,000 employees. The purpose of the study is to provide organizations with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of CEM.

For more information, access the study and other resources such as an ROI calculator that can generate a fully customized report revealing the business value CEM can bring to your organization. 

Five quantifiable benefits of Everbridge

The 2023 study revealed five quantifiable benefits of Everbridge, and several others that while unquantifiable, provided benefits to organizations.

1. Reduced business interruptions led to $3 million in efficiency gains

For the composite organization, the use of Everbridge reduced the downtime caused by business interruptions, resulting in up to $3 million in efficiency gains over three years. With CEM, organizations can react faster to unplanned interruptions and outages, communicate with appropriate stakeholders faster, and overall decrease the impact of a critical event.

2. Reduced IT downtime saved up to $2 million

Not only does the Everbridge platform reduce the potential impact on business operations, but it also decreases the costs associated with IT downtime. The TEI study found that with Everbridge, organizations can save up to $2 million over three years. Increasingly complex IT environments require intelligent solutions that help identify and alert responders to outages as they happen. With improved workflows and automated processes, IT teams can quickly join forces to remediate incidents and reduce downtime.

3. Increased security team productivity gains $1.5 million

Before Everbridge, security teams overwhelmingly relied on manual and often time-consuming processes to identify and assess potential events. When using our CEM platform however, the same organization gained 24/7 support, and efficiencies in managing data sources and communicating with appropriate stakeholders.

4. Avoided inventory and property damage saved $1.1 million

Without proactive tools, organizations rely on manual processes to identify upcoming events that threaten inventory and property. However, with Everbridge, intuitive data sets and feeds ensure that organizations can know about threats early, send alerts to those who may be potentially impacted, and avoid avertable damage.

5. Recaptured employee productivity saved $800,000+

When events are imminent, there’s no time to spare when alerting employees and other internal stakeholders. Before Everbridge, organizations lost significant time trying to get in touch with the right people, at the right time. With our resilience platform however, employee productivity is recaptured, with faster response management and coordination, totaling $861,000 over three years.

The ROI of Everbridge CEM

Based on the analysis of customer feedback and quantified benefit, cost, risk, and flexibility factors, Forrester determined that through using Everbridge’s CEM platform, organizations reduced the time taken to identify and remedy critical events, getting revenue-generating activities back up to speed more quickly. Overall, the Forrester study determined that the three-year risk-adjusted benefit of the Everbridge platform amounted to a total of US$8.47M with an ROI figure of 358%.

Calculate your organization’s potential ROI and receive a fully customized report

Discover the potential business value a critical event management platform can bring to your organization. With four simple inputs, our commissioned Forrester ROI calculator can generate a fully customized report revealing the quantifiable benefits that Everbridge CEM can bring to your organization.  Just click on the “Configure Data” tab to input your data and download your report.

Create a quantifiable business case for Everbridge critical event management

Leveraging the Everbridge CEM platform has proven to be a game-changer for organizations seeking to enhance their resilience and respond swiftly to critical events. As highlighted in the 2023 Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, businesses using Everbridge have significantly reduced the time required to identify and address critical events, ultimately expediting the return to revenue-generating activities.

But what’s the next step for you and your organization? How can you achieve similar outcomes and maximize your ROI with Everbridge Critical Event Management? The TEI checklist is the answer, designed to guide you through the essential steps of quantifying benefits, building a compelling business case, and unlocking the full potential of Everbridge CEM.

Access the TEI checklist and complete a seven-step checklist for CSOs, GSOCs, and Security Analysts.

 

Automation and AI are changing the face of IT service, but some things never change. When incidents happen, people, processes, and tools must converge to comprehend and tame a whirlwind of complexity and change. Minutes are counted in monetary measures.

Common sense argues strongly for mastery of incident response. But IT professionals frequently find it difficult to build a compelling business case for the solutions, tools, and processes they need to get the job done.

This webinar takes a clear, research-based approach to building the business case for adaptive incident response. Watch Valerie O’Connell, Research Director for Enterprise Management Associates, a leading research firm and Matt Frauenhoffer, Product Marketing Manager at xMatters, as they share a qualitative and quantitative approach to the topic.

Every day, Emergency Call Centers (ECC) and Public Safety Answering Points (PSAP) handle hundreds of emergency calls. For each call, operators must document, triage, prioritize, escalate, and route appropriately so first responders and equipment can be mobilized and dispatched in the most efficient way.

Resilience is more than just a goal that organizations strive to achieve. With an increased number of critical events, including cyber-attacks, extreme weather and violent crime, resilience is vital for the short-term and long-term success of any operation. Everbridge and Atos sought out to find the links between resilience and success, with a report from Dr. Stefan Vieweg, Director of the Institute for Compliance and Corporate Governance (ICC) at the Rheinische Fachhochschule in Cologne, Germany.

The study comprised responses from 226 businesses across Europe, with a range of employees anywhere from under 3,000 to over 100,000, and across numerous industries. Our most recent blog discussed the importance of resilience and the steps organizations can take to achieve their goals. Dr. Vieweg’s research identified seven key aspects of resilience:  

  1. Resilience has a significant impact on the bottom line.  
  2. Money is not everything in resilience.  
  3. Talking is easier than execution.  
  4. There is a reason for resilience among top performers.  
  5. An excess of spending does not necessarily help.  
  6. There is a sweet spot of resilience investment.  
  7. Digitalization and automation matter.

These seven findings can serve as the guide for organizations to assess their own strengths and weaknesses, and map out the policies and procedures they need to implement to improve their resilience.

1. Resilience has a significant impact on the bottom line 

Prioritizing resilience means taking proactive measures to reduce the impact of critical events and recover quickly. Resilience directly affects financial stability, and the data tells the whole story. The most resilient companies suffered only a 7% loss in annual sales revenue due to critical events, compared to 145% of annual sales revenue for underperforming companies. The difference is 20x greater losses.

2. Money is not everything in resilience

According to Vieweg’s research, organizations of all sizes showed a similar trend: underperforming companies almost always spent more on risk and resilience measures than the top performing ones. The biggest reason for this is the cost savings of a unified, automated solution compared to putting out fires with disparate systems each time a new critical event occurs.  

The top performing companies spent an average of 10% of revenue per year on resilience, but the least resilient companies spent over 18%. Rather than spending on piecemeal solutions or spending as critical events occur, investing in integrated, automated solutions pays off financially and in terms of greater preparedness.  

3. There is a sweet spot of resilience investment

That leads to another constant, which is that the optimal financial commitment is between 10-25% of revenue. Companies in this range allowed approximately 30% damage aversion, with companies under 50,000 employees performing slightly better. Spending more is not as important as spending wisely, namely with digitization and automation.  

4. An excess of spending does not significantly help 

While investing in resilience is critical to success, Vieweg’s research found that spending beyond 25% of annual revenue on resilience has diminishing returns. Organizations need to make careful plans for future investments to maximize return on investment.  

Similar to the reasoning in the finding that money is not everything in resilience, some decision makers may feel that spending on specific solutions to solve for risk management, digital security, employee communication, and other aspects of resilience is beneficial, when in reality, investing in one platform that provides an integrated solution for organizational resilience will save time, effort, and money.  

5. Digitization and automation matter

Dr. Vieweg’s research found a direct positive correlation between the degree of digitalization and preparedness for a critical event, particularly in terms of identifying risks. Among the top performing organizations, 46% have an early-warning system established, but only 29% of those surveyed reported very high levels of automation across processes.  

Dr. Vieweg concluded that there is a significant potential to improve resilience across organizations of all sizes with automated, integrated risk management processes.  

6. Talking is easier than execution

Over 60% of the organizations in the study acknowledged that critical events have become more frequent, more unpredictable, and have had a larger impact. But less than 50% have explicit resilience goals operationalized.  

While Vieweg’s research showed that top performing companies consider and follow through on specific goals more often than lower performing organizations, there is still an industry-wide need for growth, particularly when it comes to developing risk and resilience strategies.  

7. There is a reason for resilience among top performers

The most resilient organizations not only implemented resilience measures and risk management solutions at a higher pace than others, but these methods proved effective, were used continuously, and introduced avenues of mitigation. Over 50% of the top performers have an established risk management process.

Overall, Dr. Vieweg’s findings show that organizations who take a proactive, consistent approach to meeting established resilience goals are among the most successful. Even still, most organizations have potential for improvement in terms of digitalization and automation, and he concluded that digitalization would pay off quickly for all businesses. To learn more about these seven findings and read further analysis from the study, download our eBook “The Research Behind Resilience: Why Prioritizing and Investing in Resilience Matters.”

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