If you are creating a disaster management or an emergency response plan, congratulations. You are preparing yourself and your company for the possibility of a problem. Every business should have an ERP because you never know when natural disasters will occur. Emergencies can happen in seconds and those first few minutes are crucial to determining how you’ll fare until help arrives. Therefore, the importance of such a plan cannot be stressed enough, but figuring out how to create and implement such a plan is sometimes confusing.
Risk Assessment
The first thing you should do is determine possible emergency scenarios in your area. For example, not everyone will be hit by hurricanes or gale-force winds, so you may not need to prepare for those. If your area is prone to earthquakes or tornados, you should familiarise yourself with what happens during those disasters, which will help you develop procedures and plan to prepare your employees and company.
The minimum emergency response should include a plan to protect visitors, contractors and anyone in the facility at the time. It should include building evacuations, shelter from tornados and shelter from exterior airborne hazards.
Emergencies
When problems arise, your first priority should be the safety of lives, but the second priority is to assess the situation and stabilise the situation to minimise damage and loss of life.
What To Consider
It may be important that everyone know CPR and first aid, which can be life-saving when handling disaster management. Teaching employees how to use fire extinguishers can also help put out small fires. Learning what to do in any situation is also a necessity. Therefore, you should have fire drills, severe weather drills and lockdown drills periodically so that people understand what to do and don’t get panicked during an actual emergency situation.
After you’ve created the policies and have worked everything out on paper, you can talk with the employees and teach them what to do in these situations. All new employees should be trained on emergency response options and their importance, as well.
You may also want to consider having resources on hand, such as extra bottles of water and food in case of any problems. Once everyone is familiar with their options and what to do, you should establish a damage assessment process, which can help in the aftermath of the problem to protect property, clean things up and salvage whatever is possible.
