How Much Could Not Being Prepared Cost You?

Risk, Costs, and Solutions for Operational Readiness

In a competitive and rapidly changing market, organizations face so many daily challenges that it can be difficult to step back and prepare for unforeseen events - in part because they are unforeseen! Whether it’s a large-scale risk like a weather event, a safety crisis, a cybersecurity attack, or a global pandemic, or individual events like employee injury, asset downtime, or employee mental illness, the cost to your business can be catastrophic. The answer isn’t to be prepared for every inevitability, but to have the solutions in place to better predict what lies ahead and to respond in an agile, efficient manner when things begin to play out. Here are some examples of common challenges facing today’s organizations and how the set of solutions can protect your business by mitigating risk and optimizing operational readiness. 

Scenario: Cyber Attack & Compliance

The U.S. Casino Gaming Industry is an excellent example of a business sector that faces both intense regulation and compliance scrutiny as well as is at significant risk for cybersecurity attacks. Staying resilient in the face of these challenges is critical for casinos and a strategy to optimize their operational readiness has to be part of their overall business strategy from the beginning - a defensive posture to respond to incidents once they occur could be catastrophic. A 2016 report estimated the cost of cyber attacks on our economy to be between $57 billion and $109 billion that year, a number that is only set to grow as attacks become more prevalent and sophisticated. In our interview with Vector Solutions’ Chief Information Security Officer, Greg Surla he shared that “often, companies will give up in the face of not being able to protect everything and protect nothing. It’s always worth the time and expense of protecting the aspects of your business that are vulnerable, as most small businesses, unfortunately, do not recover from cyber attacks.” 

The cost of noncompliance to organizations isn’t just the high cost of penalties (OSHA penalties start at $13,653 and can be as much as $136,532 per violation), but can also lead to a loss of profitability because of the resulting business disruption. In both cybersecurity and compliance, the benefits of prevention significantly outweigh the cost of these solutions. 

Training is the key to preserving your operational readiness in the face of these types of attacks. Casinos are required to develop an effective risk-based AML program based on the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act and associated AML regulations, training their personnel on their individual job responsibilities, but also on all legal requirements and the casino’s compliance policies and procedures. Our Casino & Gaming course library contains over 150 gaming-specific online training courses in our powerful LMS platform, providing essential training to mitigate risk in this industry:

• AML Compliance Program
• Sexual Harassment Awareness & Prevention
• Responsible Gaming Awareness
• Bloodborne Pathogens
• Customer Loyalty Sessions 1-4
• Active Shooter Awareness
• Workplace Diversity Guidelines
• Cybersecurity Awareness for the Workplace
• Emergency Evacuation Training
• Supervisor Basics and Fundamentals

Scenario: Asset Downtime

One Aberdeen report estimates the cost for asset downtime in large industry sectors like pharmaceutical, telecommunications, and IT to be $260,000 per hour, with an average time of 4 hours. Despite these high costs, most businesses are unprepared with a strategy for zero unplanned equipment downtime. Part of creating that plan means being able to both predict, identify, and track equipment needs to resolution. In our recent article in our Safer, Smarter, Better series, A Day in the Life of An Industrial Manufacturing Employee, we illustrate how quickly and efficiently resolving a simple equipment issue (an incorrectly marked piece of machinery) avoided downtime at multiple locations, which would have left both machines and employees unable to complete their jobs, exponentially impacting the cost to the organization. It is always more expensive to fix a problem than to prevent it.

Vector Check It is a seamless, accessible mobile platform that allows organizations to avoid and minimize equipment and asset downtime by easily identifying repair and maintenance needs in their routine inspections. By providing a centralized operations management solution, employees are empowered with an efficient process for their daily apparatus inspections and inventory tracking, allowing them to quickly flag any concerns. From there, reports are routed to the appropriate management team who are able to notify and resolve issues quickly, all the while tracking the progress to completion. It’s a simple, industry-tailored tool organizations can use to reduce risk, prevent waste and human error and improve equipment uptime with:

• Mobile equipment inspections
• Visual inventory management
• Customized checklists
• Robust reporting and compliance

Scenario: Employee Injury and Mental Illness

The physical and mental safety of your employees isn’t just our responsibility as fellow human beings, but also increases our profitability and promotes performance optimization. Mental illness is likely the largest cost to your organization: over 80% of lost productivity time is due to employees who continue to show up to work while struggling with mental or physical illness or injury (“presenteeism”). Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) Management systems are an effective way for organizations in every industry to remain resilient and productive. Vector EHS Management provides all areas of safety in one easy-to-use platform that can be customized to your industry, saving you time and money and improving efficiency in your safety department by:

• Streamlining reporting with easy-to-use smart forms
• Identifying vulnerabilities and implementing improvements with EHS software
• Making critical safety data accessible and easily digested with dashboards and custom reports   
• Encouraging hazard or incident reporting from employees with mobile and anonymous tip reporting
• Scheduling, tracking, and reporting any type of inspection from within the mobile app 
• Preventing injuries by catching and implementing corrective action before incidents occur, allowing employees to report information if they’re concerned about another employee, and know that the information will be routed to the appropriate manager to help.
• Identifying training gaps and assigning training modules to the right employees at the right time.
• Analyzing job safety data allows managers to calculate the risk of any task or job.

Scenario: Natural Disaster or Health Event

From weather events to global pandemics, it’s hard to know what our organizations will face in the future, and it’s impossible to predict and prepare for everything. The solution instead is to be prepared to act in an agile manner in the face of a crisis, ensuring the right information is delivered to the right people, right when they need it. Effective, two-way communication is the most important element to disaster preparedness and continued operational readiness. 

Vector LiveSafe is the leading platform for emergency notifications, risk management, and safety communication in critical sectors like schools, law enforcement, government, and fire rescue. This mobile platform enables two-way communication to help predict, identify, resolve physical safety and security threats, lone worker risks, sexual harassment and assault incidents, or COVID-19 health concerns by:

• Using notifications from users to improve response time, rapidly responding in real-time to incidents and threats
• Notifying students and employees everywhere, across multiple channels with push notifications, SMS, and phone calls
• Identify emerging threats through real-time analytics and dashboards and anonymous crowd-sourced information (tip reporting).

Are You Ready For The Challenges of Tomorrow?

At Vector Solutions, we identified the four critical areas that most impact an organization’s operational readiness and created solutions to support each of them: Learning & Training, Operational Management, Workforce Management, and Risk Management. The right tech stack is every organization’s secret weapon to optimizing these four areas in our facilities to ensure resilience and safety in the face of the challenges we are facing today, and whatever is coming next. Ready to optimize your response to the unknown? We’re here to help.