Crisis management planning is important for any company but especially so when you cover the large geographical area that Southland’s PowerNet manages. Talon helps make crisis management in wide-spread areas much easier.
Tania Cribb, PowerNet Compliance and Risk Advisor, says PowerNet builds, maintains and manages networks on behalf of network owners in Southland, most of rural Otago, parts of Central Otago and Stewart Island.
“We’re not one of the biggest electricity network management companies but we cover the second greatest geographical area.
It’s a very diverse area, with Invercargill City surrounded by a lot of rural areas, there is such a difference in terrain in the areas we manage.”
Tania says business continuity and crisis planning are important for PowerNet but finding the right help and tools to guide them in this process was important.
She says Kestrel worked with them through every aspect of crisis management, from getting the right structure in place to having a robust plan, to impact analysis – all the way through to testing in an exercise scenario.
“Kestrel introduced us to Talon, previously our crisis management plan was paper based and this meant for our crisis management team that we had to have a copy in the car, at the office and at home. It just doesn’t work like that in real life. When Kestrel said we have this app that can do away with the paper plans it was a very simple decision for the PowerNet management team to make.”
Tania says that because of the geographical spread the company manages, the crisis management team members are out-and-about frequently.
“They may not have access to their computer but they will have their phone and their tablet. The huge value with Talon is if they don’t have network coverage, the information is cached to their device – they can still get information even if the network is down – that’s a big selling point for it, and our management team thought, ‘wow’.”
Tania says Talon is well entrenched now with all the crisis information loaded into it.
“Thankfully we haven’t had to use it in a crisis event, but the team are encouraged to go in on a regular basis to download the updates so they are familiar with it. We’ll be using Talon in our next crisis management exercise – it’s a vital tool.”
