Retail

OCA can assist large retailers, commercial property managers and property trusts with the following types of incidents or uses:

Critical infrastructure protection
Major hazards affecting property
Business continuity and disaster recovery
OHS&E incidents
Resource deployment in an incident management context
Crisis communication

OCA Incident Manager supports:

Use	Description
Retail sector assets & critical infrastructure	In the retail sector, you may have many and varied critical assets right through from logistics, to storage, public facing retail, to business to business assets. Whilst you may have asset management software in place to manage infrastructure assets, you may want to have that information integrated within an incident response tool such as OCA. OCA allows you to map out your critical infrastructure at any level of detail, track dependencies and stakeholder information, and manage site appointments and response plans. With rich media integration such as CCTV feeds, images, video or alert triggers, it provides all the information you need in a central place - giving you a total operational picture to monitor your infrastructure and respond to risks. With the asset import and synchronisation tools, you don't have to replace existing asset management systems. Rather it can complement that information and allow you to utilise this information from a strategic point of view. OCA's asset management functionality can be configured to show how many resources are available at any time, so you can allocate resources to deal with incidents more rapidly.
Major hazards	Retailers can be impacted by natural hazards, whether such incidents have an environmental or civilian impact. Public retail facilities can be damaged by floods, cyclones and fires. You may need to enact business continuity plans to communicate to staff and customers, get contingency plans in place and keep your retailing operations going. The OCA can assist with planning and responding to incidents for your own emergency response team, or also co-ordinate shared resources with other organisations via the OCA Connect interoperability tool.
Get a total overview of your business as usual incidents	If you're like most retailers, you'll have a variety of business units using different software to manage different processes. You'll have one to register OHSE incidents, one to manage your business continuity and disaster recovery plans, risk management and major emergencies. Many organisations have resources distributed rather than having centralised assets. Hardware and software devices to manage such assets' information can also vary widely. OCA can assist by bringing information about disparate asset and information sources into the one system, giving you a common operating picture of what is going on, where.
Loss prevention & security incidents	Security incidents happen every day in retail ranging from minor security breaches, stock theft, and security issues with customers and staff alike. You may have multiple systems for monitoring and raising alarms, or for other stock loss events such as refrigeration system failures. A common challenge in physical security is the various access control systems and alarms that don't interoperate. Often manual monitoring and escalation is required, with the potential for delays in responses, inconsistencies and wasted effort. The benefit of the OCA is that it can consume information and alarms from third party systems giving you a total situational awareness in relation to all incidents. Not only can OCA automatically notify key stakeholders, but it can enforce standard operating procedures to follow as a result of these incidents. OCA does more than just issue an alert; its workflow tool can create an action plan to deal with the overall incident.
IT incidents	IT incidents happen on a regular basis in all organisations, but IT incidents in the retail sector can have an enormous impact. Outages that impact your ability to sell goods and services, or transfer financial assets at critical banking times can cost you money. If your internet services such as ecommerce facilities go down, hundreds of thousands of businesses, and consumers can be affected, and this can end up costing you business - as consumers churn very quickly in such situations. The OCA complements IT monitoring systems by collating IT alerts from multiple systems into the one place, so you have a total situational awareness of any IT outages from the business. OCA also allows you to automate the human responses in relation to IT incidents.
Compliance & business continuity	The retail sector is highly governed by compliance requirements, due largely to its consumer facing role. Decision making in relation to incidents, preparation and response forms part of those compliance requirements and is keenly monitored. An incident happens and you need to work out whether you had done everything you could to ensure that that asset was adequately monitored and maintained? Did you do the site inspections properly? Did you have monitoring tools in place? If you look after assets that are places of mass gathering or have a steady flow of the public, then you may have to deal with OHS&E matters in a very specific manner. OCA can assist by ensuring that the right procedures are followed. The tasking system allows you to automate regular tasks such as inspections, or business continuity plans, or responses to OHS&E issues. The workflow engine allows you to ensure that tasks are completed or escalated. OCA's audit trail can also track where a decision have been made, whether you responded in the timelines that you set for yourself, and provides transparency in post hoc investigations into incidents, whether they be an internal audit or an independent commission.
Make decisions quickly, and mitigate costs	When your organisation is impacted by incidents the cost can be enormous. Not finding the root cause of the problem early on can have an on-flow effect to other operational capabilities. Every second counts in response to incidents. OCA can shorten your response times and reduce the financial and reputational impact. OCA has a powerful workflow engine that allows you to automate response procedures - business continuity plans, emergency response plans or standard operating procedures - to ensure that your resources follow the plan.
Alerting	Good communications to staff, your consumers, the general public and other key stakeholders can provide retailers with a competitive edge. The OCA alerting platform is totally integrated in OCA. You can send information via email, SMS, fax, voice and XML - conforming with the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) standard. Send out reminders for site inspections of critical infrastructure, keep key stakeholders informed, and use the workflow tools to automate communications around utilities, related emergency plans, or operating procedures. You can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools. The alerting tools in OCA are totally integrated with your incident and asset management, requests for assistance, and situational reporting, meaning that you can send out the right pieces of information at the touch of a button. Moreover, if you have standardised communication that needs to be sent in relation to particular incidents, then the OCA workflows tool can automate that communication. Often an incident will affect a geographical area, or multiple areas. The OCA geospatial tools allow you to plot affected areas and send communication to key stakeholders in those areas. Using the asset tool you can reach key utilities workers and responders in a targeted and sophisticated manner. You can also use OCA to quickly identify assets and people within a geographical area, or mark-up an incident map for sharing with other stakeholders.
Protecting your reputation, getting the message out	Even minor incidents in the retail sector can have a huge impact on customers purchasing behaviour. Minor incidents can get picked up by the media and turned into major events if not carefully managed. Getting the message through to your stakeholders expeditiously may not resolve the problem, but it can help manage expectations, and that in turn assists in preserving your brand's reputation. Getting the message out via other distributors of information - radio, television, newspapers or social media can assist greatly. With the OCA, you can also send messages from a single source to multiple media, including public websites, intranets, and social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. The alerting tools in OCA are totally integrated with your incident and asset management, tasking, and situational reporting, meaning that you can send out the right pieces of information at the touch of a button.
Security	Security of information is key for retailers, particularly from a privacy compliance point of view, but also from the potential to disrupt operations and fraud around credit cards. OCA Incident Manager guarantees security and is the only incident management product in the world to be certified to the internationally recognised Common Criteria EAL2+ security rating - (ISO/IEC 15408). The OCA's multi-node cloud software offering is hosted by Fujitsu with data centres that meet the stringent ASIO T4 and ISO27001 standards. You can also host the application yourself, and we have experience in setting up hardware in classified environments. If security of data matters to you, then you can't do better than OCA.
Resource management & tracking	The OCA asset and tasking modules can be used to allocate any resources to incidents or tasks, be they human, fixed, mobile, vehicles or equipment. Tasking can be internal as well as external, with requests to third party agencies monitored in real-time via OCA Connect. Resources can locate and allocated geographically, by availability, by capability, by type, or by cost. You can also track costs against resource requests or allocations, to easily manage the overall cost of a response or recovery effort. OCA's simple data management tools allow you to create new asset categories on the fly.
Crisis severity	OCA deals with different levels of crises, and can be easily configured to match your crisis matrix. When an incident moves from low to high severity, you can use the workflow tool to send communication out to staff and get them in to work on the incident, quickly and efficiently.