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How Lancashire Resilience Forum Coordinates Crises with AtHoc

“When you’re trying to contact thirty or more organizations via phone, you’re potentially hours into a response before you’ve told everyone what’s going on. AtHoc shaves that down to a few minutes at most. It lets us quickly pass on information and then immediately get on with coordinating the response.”
— Kevin Topping, Emergency Planning Manager, Lancashire County Council

Communication and coordination are the first steps in mitigating any crisis. If responding organisations aren’t notified of an emergency in a timely fashion, the entire response suffers. Lancashire County Council Emergency Planning Manager Kevin Topping’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. In addition to handling external planning during peacetime, Kevin and the team at Lancashire County Council, along with Responding Organisations within the LRF (Lancashire Resilience Forum) are the first port of call when major incidents impact the county.

“When an incident occurs that requires multi agency coordination, we assess the potential impacts and response requirements," explains Kevin. “The LRF’s main role is to bring all the organisations that have a part to play in planning, response, and recovery together. This enables multi agency coordination. The idea is that we can get everything done in one go rather than working in silos — and the faster we can get that work started, the better.”

It was this need for efficiency that brought Lancashire County Council to BlackBerry® AtHoc®.

Initial response time reduced from hours to minutes

Enhanced situational awareness during multi-agency incidents

Future-proof, intuitive, and easy to integrate

Breaking the Communication Bottleneck

Shared Situational Awareness in a response is crucial. It provides a common understanding of the risks and enables better coordination and decisions making. Historically, ensuring all Responder Organisations were notified was easier said than done.

“We could really only notify people over the phone, as other mediums like email and text had no way to confirm receipt,” says Kevin. “The biggest challenge there was that even if you spent only five minutes on the phone each time — which was rarely the case — you’re looking at contacting up to thirty organisations. At the minimum, that means an hour and a half to two hours just for initial coordination.”

“That’s not really acceptable in 2024,” he adds. “Not when there are better ways of doing it.”

A major technical challenge of LRFs is that they don’t exist as official organizations.

Since LRF’s are a collective rather than a single entity, it’s difficult to set up or deploy anything exclusively for their use. Kevin and his team had this in mind when they began looking for a critical event management (CEM) tool.

They needed a way to simultaneously notify every stakeholder during a crisis. Whatever tool they chose needed to be interoperable and easy to both manage and deploy. BlackBerry AtHoc ended up being the winning choice, and not just because of its functionality.

“When we were originally meeting with providers and discussing cost, BlackBerry’s quote was exactly what we were told it would be,” recalls Kevin. “There was no inflation or hidden fees. The support team has also been great; They’ve always been happy to answer our questions and they’re also really receptive to feedback, working with us to make sure the platform works for us.”

The Benefits of Better Coordination

The Benefits of Better Coordination

Kevin knew AtHoc did exactly what his team needed it to do — but when the cyclone Storm Darragh struck the UK near the end of 2024, he was able to truly put it to the test. A multi-agency Pre-Incident Advisory Meeting was convened, prior to the storms expected arrival. Lancashire County Council has responsibility for notifying 14 partners within the multi-agency notification cascade.

“All I had to do was log into AtHoc, fill in the form with the details, date, and time of the meeting, select the organisations I wanted to notify, and click send,” Kevin recalls. “I went downstairs, I made a brew, and by the time I came back upstairs, everyone had acknowledged it.

Kevin also notes that the AtHoc platform’s reporting and two-way alerting functionality allow for more in-depth post-incident debriefs. He also appreciates how easy it is to ensure alerts only go out to legitimate entities. "The fact that agencies in other regions can easily send alerts to Lancashire Resilience Forum, future proofs the system and provides further benefits as we move forward."

Building a Future on Collaboration and Coordination

Finally, there’s the matter of the AtHoc platform’s interoperability. Kevin knows of several organisations regionally and nationally that are looking to purchase the platform. All they’ll need to do is set up a connection between AtHoc instances.

“In a lot of cases, that’ll work even better,” notes Kevin. “To be able to get a system we can use and license to everyone and keep building is great.”

“AtHoc is going to save us so much time not just as an individual response, but throughout the year across multiple responses,” he adds. “And for recipients, they know they’re going to get told at the same time as everyone else rather than organisations further down the list having less time to respond. From the perspective of a duty officer, it’s a massive game-changer."

“We are also actively working on a solution to effecting link up the AtHoc notification with Microsoft Teams, by automating the creation of a channel and meeting based on the initial alert,” he says. “Again, saving valuable time on repetitive and manual workflows.”

Lancashire County Council logo

Industry

Public Sector

Location

United Kingdom