Recent disasters have shown that companies focused on the process of finding their employees after a disaster are more resilient than those intent only on keeping their systems running, says Yossi Sheffi, director of MIT’s Center for Logistics and Transportation and author of The Resilient Enterprise. After Hurricane Katrina, for example, Sheffi notes that Wal-Mart’s first order of business was to account for all employees. Only then did it reopen its affected stores. "The first thing [in a crisis management strategy] would be to instill in your employees the importance of getting in touch after a disaster," says Sheffi.

Keep It Simple and Flexible

Gale GFS employees agree that policies urging employees to keep in touch with each other are as important in a crisis as the technology itself. Adding the Incident Reporting System—which operates as a sort of business blog—to Gale GFS’s portal site was not complicated, Messineo says. Essentially, an employee can log on to the Web-based system with a user name and password and write about a hurricane, an explosion or any other incident. Gale GFS designed and built its system to automatically send out an e-mail notification to everyone in the region. Through an online control panel, administrators can determine who gets notified by region and by company. E-mail alerts pop up on cell phones and BlackBerry pagers, as well as on computer screens. Originally, Messineo says, AT&T said it wanted to be able to track 40 fields of information—ranging from precise location to detailed weather conditions and number of employees—for each incident. That level of complexity, however, would mean that the system would be slow. Messineo decided to reduce the number of categories within each type of incident to a maximum of eight. The result: Employees can connect to the system using a 56K modem with pages loading in under three seconds. And they can also access the system from an Internet caf¿or any other Web connection.

According to Marlow, who is also COO of Gale GFS’s parent, the Gale Company, the main challenge was to make sure that top executives could communicate with employees from inside an affected location using multiple forms of communication. Just after the 9/11 attacks, for example, telephone traffic was rerouted and it was impossible to call the World Trade Center area using landlines. In the London bombings, the cellular network was essentially shut down, but Internet and BlackBerry communication was still working.

"The goal is to be prepared for any type of incident, whether it’s a hurricane or tornado, or bomb scare or terrorist attack," says Marlow. "Communication lines will be affected depending on the incident, so we need to remain flexible."