By Hiplink on Monday, 12 September 2022
Category: IT - Information Technology

How Alarm Management Prevents Financial Losses During IT Downtime

No matter how many preventative strategies are implemented by a company, incidents can and do happen. Whether a factory has a production line that suddenly fails, or a retailer's EDI system goes down, problems will ensue.

And if real-time alerts aren’t enabled to activate the right resources to respond to the emergency, the financial losses a company might experience can be exponential.

Every minute that a critical system is down can cause irreparable harm to a business’ profit margins and reputation. But upgrading existing fail-safe systems using a responsive alarm management solution can ensure that any service interruptions are minimal and that businesses can return to being operational as quickly as possible. 

 

The Inadequacies of Traditional Alert Management Solutions

Many legacy alert management solutions rely on single points of contact, such as a company pager or email, to contact relevant parties. Unfortunately, in today’s multi-touchpoint workspace, employees or even third-party vendors may be in the field or using other approved devices such as personal smartphones or tablets. 

Additionally, there’s also a risk that employees, vendors, and/or suppliers who are not relevant stakeholders may be alerted. Worse still, for larger organizations with multiple locations, there’s the potential that the wrong regional department may be notified — causing even more confusion.

This leads to a clunky and slow response system as internal and external teams must first figure out who is the right party or department that should be in charge of fixing the problem. Likewise, individuals that don’t have access to company devices or who are not actively engaging with their email may miss notifications and further delay the response. 

As a result, the problem is compounded at every step of the response process. Productivity is impacted, and ultimately the corporation suffers from reduced output or customer satisfaction depending on their industry. And depending on the severity of the emergency, the situation can snowball as the right response is delayed thanks to confusion regarding the chain of command. 

 

A Modern Solution for an Age-Old Problem

While HipLink can’t prevent problems from arising, automated text alert software can streamline the alarms from a management system to ensure that the right departments and individuals are contacted through multiple touchpoints that result in timely responses and minimal disruptions to corporate operations. 

The highly customizable system allows clients to outline a wide range of parameters that trigger automated alarm messaging to be sent to pre-designated individuals. Alerts aren’t limited to just two-way pager messaging for company equipment. Clients can also leverage: 

And companies can configure grouped outreach for full-department notifications or to only relevant response team members flagged in the system as actively “on duty” at the time of the incident. 

Likewise, triggers can be customized to ensure that larger organizations with multiple facilities can target location-specific stakeholders assigned to the emergency site. More importantly, clients can escalate messages to more senior individuals until an acknowledgment is received.

Meanwhile, all messages and responses are logged and recorded in the system for future review if needed. Best of all, HipLink’s SaaS solution can be easily integrated into existing software, reducing typical delays associated with the onboarding process and further fortifying a corporation’s emergency response strategy.