ATI Disaster Recovery Services specializes in restoration, environmental and reconstruction services following natural and man-made disasters including fires, floods, mold remediation, lead and asbestos removal, and provides disaster preparedness assessment and training across the country.
Early in 2020, ATI recognized it needed a new company-wide critical event management solution. Their business continuity and disaster recovery plans were in different formats and not always accessible to all team members, especially field representatives.
We sat down with ATI’s EVP of Revenue and Innovation, Jeff Magoon, and he shared that “ATI employees work in disaster situations, a building is on fire, a hurricane is about to hit. They need immediate access to actionable information and protocols that are easy to use. With my 24 years in disaster recovery, I know that implementing technology, if the tool is not easy to use, it is really hard.”
When, in March, COVID-19 struck in the US—the world changed instantly—the need for a platform they could deploy quickly became more urgent. For ATI, the In Case of Crisis Platform was an easy choice. Magoon continued “In Case of Crisis brings all the information into one application, making everything easy to find, you can push out critical information in real time to the entire organization regardless of individual locations, it is a way for us to document actions by employees, and to give employees the answer they need versus relying on their memory or access to a crisis management binder.”
With more than 1100 employees on the frontlines of disaster response in commercial, industrial, healthcare, education, hospitality and residential scenarios, ATI needed a way to collect health reports from their employees and their clients to ensure everyone remained healthy and safe during disaster response and the pandemic.
ATI made In Case of Crisis available to more than 1100 employees with two Playbooks, available in English and Spanish.
The first Playbook enabled ATI field technicians to conduct their own daily health check-in. Team members reported if they were symptom-free, or what, if any symptoms they had. From there, the workflows in the platform took over, either recording in the database that the employee was symptom-free or providing immediate information to the employee for their next steps while also escalating the report to HR to initiate additional protocols as needed.
The second Playbook enabled client check-ins. When ATI field technicians arrive at a jobsite, they ask the clients questions regarding their own symptoms and as to those of anyone else on-site.
ATI’s Magoon reports that “there have been cases where our team reported to a jobsite and through the questions have uncovered that someone does have symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and through In Case of Crisis we’re able to escalate critical information to our safety team and initiate the protocols we have in place.”
Through an understanding of ATI’s process, plans, protocols and their care to ensure the safety of clients, both ATI and their clients have been able to remain healthy and safe. Magoon added “In Case of Crisis allows us to be proactive and keep our team out of harm's way, vs. going in blindly, and then having to find out there was an additional risk that we now have to mitigate.”
As ATI was facing challenges to business continuity, they realized their clients faced the same challenges, no way to operationalize or keep their plans up to date. With the first phase of platform adoption complete, ATI is rolling out phase two—a client-facing solution called ATI Alert—in the coming months. In summing up his thoughts, Magoon concluded “Giving our clients the access to this same technology is a tremendous value to our current customers that will differentiate ATI amongst our competitors and help create an unmatched ecosystem of preparedness.”
