What Will Your Sign on The Door Read?

7/17/2017 (Permalink)

Will your business have to close after an emergency? Read our best tips for minimizing downtime!

I recently had a conversation with a maintenance manager, John. His office shares space with one of the buildings he manages.

 I asked, "John, what would happen to this facility if you were at one of your other locations and a emergency happened here?"

"Well, I would have to leave that site and travel here" he stated.

"But what if that building also had an emergency? Who would be able to get access to your mechanical room to get a situation under control?"

"Well, I have the keys. The managers all know to just call me."

"So you are managing a broken sprinkler line at site A and site B calls with a broken water line... What do you do" I asked.

John thought for a moment, I went on. 

"John, you like to fish. You are out on the river with no cell service. How are the people who depend on that space being usable to stay productive going to manage a emergency in your absence?"

His organization had stretched him too thin and had failed to develop contingency plans to help him manage emergencies remotely. His basement office housed the only emergency plans and blueprints for the facility he was in. His office was kept locked when he was not around. And, as you can guess, he had the keys on his person.

Luckily, SERVPRO has a solution. The SERVPRO Emergency Ready Program (ERP). A quick cloud based collection of need-to-know information to handle building emergencies. It's not as exhaustive as a complete risk management program, but it can serve as a great starting point to begin those emergency preparedness discussions with important information that key people at every site should know.

Make sure a primary employee at every site has keys to the mechanical room and knowing where the shut off values are.

In John's case it was a relatively painless fix. Every site now has another person with a set of keys to the mechanical room and that data is fed into the ERP cloud so every business in the building can access it. It was a time investment of less than two hours that almost certainly will save both time and money in an emergency.

The best part? John now has a plan to be able to prioritize his response and emergency needs. He also feels a little less worried when goes off grid chasing Steelhead on the Snake River.

For questions or to set up your no-cost Emergency Readiness Program, call 375-0300