Product Recalls, Food Recalls and Emergency Notification
Posted by ERMS Corporation on Fri, Sep 24, 2010
Communication during a Product Recall presents unique challenges. I've had several conversations lately with executives concerned with communication during a serious product recall or food recall.
While we discussed high level issues such as ensuring a Crisis Management team was in place prior to any recall, there were 3 specific tactical communication concerns:
- How do we get the message out to the targeted people that have to take action to remove the recalled product or other actions as quickly as possible?
- How do we track the responses from our targeted people (for example, store managers), including not only acknowledgement of the response but compliance to the directions?
- How do we maintain an on-going emergency dialogue (outstanding issues, new information) that doesn't get lost in the day-to-day volumes of email and voicemail?
Emergency Notification systems can solve the first problem, the 2nd and 3rd are more of a challenge.
Several executives said their organizations were looking at an internal web portal to accomplish these tougher tasks. When the concept of a Crisis Management Software module already built into a Emergency Notification service was mentioned, the idea was met with open arms.
Building an internal portal, can be time consuming, expensive and integration to an Emergency Notification difficult. Alternatively, an integrated Crisis Management module provides the mechanism to ensure not only that the message been received by store managers, but there is a structure to track: issues, risks, actions, and compliance to directions -- and share and distribute this information across the team. All outside of the day-to-day email and voice mail channels.
If you want to see more information on an example of this type of capability, click on Crisis Management Software within Emergency Notification.
