Assembling personnel with a modern, efficient and

price effective Group Alert solution

C

LIENT USE CASE

N O R W AY

Assembling personnel with a modern, efficient and price effective Group Alert solution

2©UMS 2016 • umsalert.com

When calling in personnel, Herøya Industrial Preparedness used a system with insufficient phone lines. The solution was very expensive and because of the high cost per line they chose to have fewer lines available and the process of calling rescue workers took far too long. With UMS Group Alert System they moved from an inefficient and costly system to a modern, efficient and price effective solution.

Herøya Industrial Park (HIP) was estab-lished by Hydro in 1928-1929 as a site for the production of fertilisers in Porsg-runn on the south east coast of Norway. Hydro is a global aluminium company with production, sales and trading ac-tivities throughout the value chain. Over the years, the area has undergone sub-stantial change from being a purely Hy-dro production site to its current status as an open industrial park.

As many as 80 businesses are now es-tablished at Herøya Industrial Park, em-ploying a total of 2.500. The main com-panies at the industrial park are Hydro and Yara, which branched out from Hy-dro in 2004. Some of the other compa-nies present in the park include well-known companies like Evry, Statoil and Nokas.

The industrial park has established its own rescue operation, Herøya Industrial Preparedness, to support the local fire and police departments in case of an emergency. This operation has 40 em-ployees and has its own control room, fire truck, fire fighters, smoke divers and medical staff.

If there is a fire, explosion, accident or any other incident, the personnel on watch in the control room have to quickly assemble relevant rescue workers.

VOICE mESSAgES fOR URgENT mESSAgESVoice messages is the primary channel for urgent “call-in-the troops” messag-es, and the employees must respond to the voice message if they are available for the assignment.

Herøya Industrial Preparedness can now

assemble personnel within a short time for an

emergency and feel safer that technology will help in

a precise manner.

Photo: B

itjungle/wikipedia

3

Unified Messaging Systems AS • www.umsalert.comInnspurten 15, 0663 OSLO • Pb. 6301, Etterstad, 0604 OSLO, Norway

©UMS 2016 • umsalert.com

With the previous solution, Herøya In-dustrial Preparedness was charged for the number of telephone lines avail-able to them at any time. The charge per line was high and even with pay-ing for just a few lines the solution cost them a considerable amount of money. It was therefore chosen to have fewer lines available which made the process of calling rescue workers far too long. Running this solution took too much time and HIP explored better and more efficient methods to assemble person-nel. UMS was chosen as the new sup-plier with our web based Group Alert so-lution. The new system does not require any maintenance on the client’s side and provides a capacity roughly 100 times higher than the former solution. UMS’ Group Alert also offers richer function-alities with a simple and easy-to-use interface.

USINg ThE gROUp ALERT SYSTEm TO ASSEmbLE pERSONNELBefore the UMS solution was imple-mented in 2007, the process of assem-bling relevant personnel took a lot of time. It was also reported that the old system had some considerable down-time periods due to IT malfunctions. UMS’ Group Alert permits the authori-ties at Herøya Industrial Preparedness to organise their contact directory in role based hierarchies and also allows them to create an unlimited number of groups to organise contacts. In addi-tion to this, each contact can have one or more contact number which can be stored as primary and secondary cor-respondence numbers. The system’s web based interface is simple and easy to use and allows authorities to quickly disseminate alerts.

“ScenarioFront” is an additional feature that allows the quick dissemination of alerts during emergencies. Authorities can create multiple scenarios and pre-define alert messages to various groups (e.g. “Fire in HIP. Request immediate aid” to the fire brigade) and broadcast the information to desired groups with minimal clicks, further saving precious time. The system comes with a highly scalable and robust database that can store virtually an unlimited number of contacts without hampering the perfor-mance of the system.

With the UMS Group Alert System, Herøya Industrial Preparedness moved from an inefficient and costly system to a modern, efficient and price effective solution. They can now assemble per-sonnel within a short time for an emer-gency and feel safer that technology will help in a precise manner.

With the UMS Group Alert System,

they moved from an inefficient and costly system to a modern,

efficient and price effective solution.

C

LIENT USE CASE

N O R W AY