Hello, and welcome to today's webinar on emergency response plans. Our speaker today is Troy Tepp from Century Insurance. Also with us this morning is Brian McGuire, President and CEO of AED. Before I turn it over to Brian, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the webinar via the chat box in the lower left side of your screen. The slide deck from today's presentation is available as a PDF in the handouts tab of the webinar homepage. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch on demand at your convenience. And with that, I will turn it over to Brian. Thank you, Liz. First of all, thank you to Troy and Century for taking time to present to us today on a very timely topic. Please feel free to submit your questions in the chat box. As Liz has said, we'll hit those questions at the end of the presentation. And I would remind everybody that Troy's presentation will be a very high-level one today, but I'm sure that he will provide you with his contact information to follow up with specific questions you may have. So, without further ado, let's get started. And, Troy, thank you again for joining us. Liz and Brian, hey, thank you so much. We really appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with the AED in regards to this session and really appreciate everybody for taking time out of their busy schedules. Definitely understand how challenging things are in this particular time. So, what I wanted to do is, as Brian indicated, this is going to be a very high-level session. We're not going to be COVID-19 specific. But what we wanted to do is help you give some thought to how your dealership can actually respond to an emergency event and talk a little bit about the pre-planning coordination and coordination that you want to have really in the can once that event actually happens. So now, surely, today's or the country's current COVID-19 pandemic situation is just an example of such a situation, but consider if you're actually prepared to respond and recover from a more likely catastrophic event. So that could be a weather case, a fire, severe medical condition, things along that line that are probably more likely to affect your organization on a day-to-day basis rather than the circumstances or situation that we're seeing with COVID-19. I'm Troy Tepp, the Director of Safety Services with Century Insurance. Century is an AED-preferred provider for property and casualty insurance as well as 401k benefits. And it is my pleasure, absolutely, to be with you today. Before we get started, I wanted to help you get into the mindset of our discussion. So while the current pandemic is definitely a stark example, it isn't the best example of emergency cases that are most likely to impact your dealership every year. And again, as I said, such as maybe a flood, tornado, major medical issue, you know, to a bomb threat or possibly an attack on your sensitive technology or data within the organization. So let's jump into this with a quick review of our agenda. We'll be touching on the key components of a written emergency response and recovery procedures that we hope you'll take the time to invest to develop for your own dealership if you've not already done that. And maybe it's an opportunity to go back and evaluate what you currently have on record and fill in some gaps that may surface or arise from our discussion. So this is going to include a review of our goals and priorities and more specifically, you know, what's involved with conducting a risk assessment. So how do I evaluate what's actually at risk here for my organization? We're going to talk about pre-planning and building organizational awareness within your dealership as well as defining your response procedures. And we're also going to talk about available resources and training as well as exercising of your plan along with really how to stabilize or some of the considerations of stabilizing a site following an emergency event. And then lastly, we'll spend a few minutes reviewing the key elements that should be incorporated into your plan for recovery once an event is over and your site has actually been stabilized. So then the question really becomes, what do we do from there? How do we get back up and running? So let's get started on the actual elements to be developed in your plan. Let's drop a few goals and priorities in front of those things. First, the top priority in any emergency response plan is always going to be on developing procedures that prioritize protecting the lives and safety of your staff as well as customers and any other visitors to your facilities. Now, I've mentioned a few incidents that can occur in your facilities, but keep in mind that your procedures actually need to account for employees that may be outside of, say, your fixed-based operations, such as your field service technicians, parts drivers, or equipment delivery drivers. And once your life safety priorities have been addressed, your secondary priorities can then refocus on procedures that are going to help stabilize and protect your building, its premises, and any other key assets of the dealership. And then lastly, you're going to want to focus on the goals, other goals or procedures that may need to be addressed as part of the business protection in terms of sensitive records, protecting those records, monies that may be kept on site, or customer machinery held on premises. So basically, that allows us to go into that secondary phase of reaction once we've protected the lives and safety of our employees as well as customers or any other individuals that may be on site. Now let's talk a little bit about the risk assessment that you'll need to accomplish as part of defining your emergency scenarios. What's likely to affect your locations? So why is this step so essential? Basically it forms the basis of your response plan. So as you begin to assess foreseeable risks, try to consider three primary subgroups of, I'm going to say, scenarios that could occur or emergencies. These are going to be natural, human, or technological. And they could include weather events, storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, medical injuries, robberies, bomb threats, or as I said before, possibly a data breach that could directly involve the dealership's technology or its information database. So while you consider those possible emergency scenarios to build your plan around, also keep in mind that many emergencies can pose a heightened seasonal risk. So for example, depending on where you're located throughout the country, as far as hurricanes or tornadoes, consider when they're most prevalent. Those are going to be the spring, summer, and fall months. You could extend that in the upper Midwest, in the northern states, the situation involving major snowstorms, ice storms. Those may be events that could affect us for a long time and that we would want to respond to in our plans. Okay, so at this point, we've identified the goals and the priorities for our plan and likely risks. Let's now consider our first step towards wrapping procedures around our likely scenarios. By capturing a consistent set of elements for each of your foreseeable emergency cases. So for example, if a tornado event is one of your most foreseeable emergencies, you'll begin to create specific procedures that will identify available alarms, notices, alerts, and surveillance systems that will alert your facility to such events. Now this holds true for identifying your staff or the ability to reach your staff in the event of an affected store, as well as informing your remote or your in-transit staff. Additionally, you'll want to understand the resources that will be available from your municipal agencies. So you're kind of getting a handle on what's going to be available and how do we access that once an event is in process or has occurred, how do we begin to put that in action? Now so far we've talked about understanding the resources or the assistance available to help your plans be effective, but part of your assessment relies on also gaining a clear understanding of functional gaps that your dealership may need to fill. So these potential needs could include education of your staff on each of your emergency risks, maybe their roles or responsibilities to deal with those emergencies in an actual event. An interesting part of those roles can involve handling staff who may need assistance because of unique or special needs, especially when it comes to a facility evacuation or reaching a shelter. Speaking of evacuation, a major element in your planning actually needs to involve determining available or maybe needed evacuation routes or shelter spaces. It's not uncommon to at times look at our facilities and say we don't have an appropriate space that we would consider to be shelter worthy. And you know, we've worked with businesses that quite honestly have built those within their existing facilities. So as you're considering each of these items, remember to evaluate the broad expertise of your staff on those types of issues along with the skills of your response team that is going to be put into action to handle the planned response for each of those emergency cases. So to this point, we've really focused our effort on investing in the initial phase of assessing goals for your emergency response plan, the likely emergency scenarios that could affect your facilities and your people, available resources, and development needs. So we're now ready to start developing the actual response procedures for each of those emergency scenarios that you determined are most likely to affect your dealership. Now remember, these procedures are going to be typically unique for each scenario. It's unlikely that your responses are going to be identical for any two types of emergencies. Along with response procedures and staff responsibilities, you'll also be looking to document specific steps for notification. So how do we become aware of it and then how do we communicate that? Additional communications that we will probably want to be making to other individuals and organizations that are affected by what's impacted us. Triggers to activate your assigned response team, designated evacuation and shelter spaces, as well as your planned role for emergency response services that may be available in your community. Now one area that many companies do struggle with is how to manage the final two items. They do require some forethought, some planning to determine how and where to account for your staff as each of your emergency responses unfolds. So this needs to occur in an area where staff is expected to evacuate to while ensuring everyone is fully accounted for and at the same time typically needs to be distant from the facility. Depending on in a fire event how you're evacuating the facility, that will complicate the situation because you're having your people move away from the building. The ability to clear a facility with an all clear signal also needs to be based on an objective finding once all of the hazards have been neutralized. Again this particular step is needed for each emergency situation but has to be well thought out beforehand to ensure a smooth process in a real event. Okay, I apologize, a little bit of a glitch here. I just lost my screen but we're going to continue. We've now covered the basic process of developing your dealership's emergency response procedures but where you can find the technical information, where do you find that technical information and support to help pull your entire program together? Along with resource links, I'll be sending everyone immediately following this session. I encourage you and your team to develop strong collaborative relationships with your municipality's emergency response agencies or available commercial response services. Of course, this encompasses direct consultation with your local fire and police departments as well as emergency medical response services. The interesting part is that these groups are often very willing to assist in both evaluating and developing your plan responses as well as your annual training and drills. One area I'd like to spend a few more minutes on is stabilizing your site after an emergency event has been neutralized or you've regained control of the situation and it's no longer a hazard or a threat. This process can really work smoothly but it does require some serious pre-planning and really practice by your dealership. The key is for your team to have a strong technical awareness of each of your pre-planned emergency scenarios, both how they're caused and the safe practices needed to isolate them. We know what caused those situations but subsequently, how do we gain control of that scenario and prevent it from being a risk or a hazard going forward? Additionally, you're pre-planning strong rescue plans. That's going to be an essential need to protect your top priority, and remember, that was life safety of all persons on site during an event. Part of your rescue planning involves the staff count that we talked about, procedures to ensure accessing the site is safe. That's going to be essential because you don't want secondary damage and or injuries to occur as you access an unsafe site. So once the premises is entirely neutralized, it's really time to implement site security and appropriate controls to prevent secondary damage to equipment or machinery. Take for example, in a fire situation, damage from secondary oxidation to equipment or machinery can be incredibly damaging as secondary cause of loss, meaning damage to the dealership, but it can be mitigated if timely action is taken to prevent that oxidation. Before we move into a few basic recovery practices, let's touch briefly on your exercises to validate your procedures as being effective and that your staff is well aware of their responsibilities. You can accomplish this level of competency across your staff by conducting initial training on your procedures and refreshing annually thereafter, along with conducting periodic drills to test and retest your process as changes are made. So as drills are conducted annually, don't just walk through the steps, monitor the performance and the awareness of your staff across the dealership and as identified, implement modifications to improve any gaps that you may find. So what we learned today makes us better tomorrow. Okay, folks, to this point, we've talked exclusively about planning your emergency response plans that will be deployed throughout an emergency scenario, not if it affects your dealership, but when it affects your dealership. So let's now spend a few minutes on the basics of what you'll build into your business recovery plan once an emergency has been successfully navigated and your recovery begins. First, be sure the incident is reported to your insurance carrier in a timely manner. The bottom line is the quicker a report is submitted, the faster an investigation can ensue and reimbursements for your damages can begin. Secondly, the dealership will deploy its assigned business recovery team at this point. So this is something that you've pre-assigned as part of your recovery plan and this team is specifically designed because of their knowledge and skills of what's needed in the organization and how to lead through probably some pretty challenging times, how they'll be able to assist and oversee that recovery to a successful conclusion. So there are other elements of your plan that will definitely need to be accomplished. That's going to include evaluating a temporary determination of essential staff, possibly versus secondary staff. This effort is going to allow the creation of needed recovery operations, energy needs, and alternative site availability. With short-term operations recovered, you're now in a position to employ IT needs. So you're looking respective to essential data, your base staff, your core staff that will help with the IT needs at that particular time, as well as hardware and software needs to progressively move the dealership along through its recovery. So you'll need that initial core of that information and then adding to it as the operations continue to gain traction through its recovery. Now this also applies to communication as well. As you keep your staff, customers, municipal officials, and suppliers apprised of how your dealership is doing through its recovery, basically you want to keep that communication fluid with anybody who can benefit from that update to understand where you are in the process of recovery. So as your recovery continues to progress, that recovery team is going to quickly become adept at conducting daily updates on progress reached and the next steps to be accomplished along the way. Again, as you gain traction, that communication will become more fluid and more effective. So with progress made, that allows additional staff to return to the workplace, as well as being sure that the recoveries are appropriately trained or employees are appropriately trained to ensure their proficiency in the newly recovered workplace. Okay. Folks, we've reached the end of this overview and what I wanted to do is spend some time talking through some questions that you may have. I'll be working with the AED team. Before we do that, I will be working with the AED team to forward everyone a set of resource links that will offer access to a very robust set of resources that can help you reduce your time investment to develop these plans. We find that most dealerships have some semblance of an emergency response and recovery planning, but this is a good opportunity to cross-check what you have in place and possibly fortify that to make your planning even more clear and more comprehensive for, again, not if that event happens, but when that event happens. Okay. So at this point, I'd like to answer a few questions from the group. Liz, have we received anything, any questions on your end? No, not yet. Okay. All right. Very good. Folks, if you do have questions, please feel free to forward those to Liz. I do see that there are a couple of items that have come in on my end that I'm able to see. So I will walk through those at this point. So this first question is, you've said life safety is always the number one priority and goal for an emergency response plan. Will my responses and eventual recovery be hurt if my dealership is prioritizing physical assets, building, and inventory specifically? So basically the question is, is it okay to prioritize assets, building, equipment, inventory in front of the life safety concerns? Well, the short answer to that is yes. That's going to create a bit of a problem. So if a dealership directs its emergency response and recovery planning on hard assets, if that's where the focus is, it's going to likely be a struggle to manage key plan elements like that will affect people, specifically communications, evacuation, staff retention, and training, possibly drills if the plan is actually going to be focused on facility and inventory. Additionally, the challenges from losing employees or any other persons on site because of an emergency event are going to be much more difficult to overcome as well if you have not preplanned for those elements. So, you know, additionally there are several operational as well as ethical reasons to prioritize the protection and safety of people into your plan. It doesn't mean that that priority is exclusive. It just means that that is the first thing that you want to build into and make sure that you're good at as far as your emergency responses are concerned for each of those scenarios that could affect your facility. And absolutely protecting property assets, the building, and facilities, that absolutely is a valuable point. It's just not the priority of the emergency response procedures. I've got one more question here. Actually, two more. Considering the current coronavirus situations, are these pandemic events an emergency scenario that I should address in my response and recovery plan? Very, very appropriate question. So while it's tempting to think that situations like the current pandemic should be in your plans, it's actually best to consider the planning you feel you can do outside of your formal response and recovery plans. And there are several reasons to consider this a unique topic. First, it's going to be difficult to plan completely for the next event. There's no doubt we're likely to see another such event. But we don't know if that's in three years, ten years, or twenty years. And we don't know what that will look like or what the needed actions are likely to be. So you can see how difficult that makes pre-planning. So additionally, it's going to be difficult to conduct practice drills or structure a recovery plan around that type of scenario. And again, give some basic thought to the current situation regarding your businesses, your dealerships, basic responses and business considerations. And use that experience of what we're going through currently as an initial baseline to respond to a similar future event. But absolutely, take every opportunity to learn from the current situation to recognize how maybe different approaches on your dealership's part can help with a better response the next time we're in that situation. Let's see. One more question that I've got on my side. So, can I hire a third party to develop my response and recovery plans? So, yes. You can hire a third party to develop your response and recovery plans. There are definitely services available that can assist with research, planning, and creating emergency response and recovery procedures for your dealerships. The essential balance is going to be to retain the depth of ownership that you need to ensure your plans represent the needs and the best interests of your organization. That's really key for you. And just remember, it's your plan. You need to be responsible for its execution and its effectiveness. Not if, but when that time arrives. Okay. Liz, any questions on your end? Yes. The first one. Have you written a sample template for dealerships as it relates to COVID, specifically for a location that must shut down because of an employee testing positive? Interesting. We have not done that at this point. What we have done is provided some basic guidelines for a dealership to consider in the way of basic procedures. So, there's really kind of two issues here. There's the sanitation, the cleaning of the facility. And if it's actually going to be shut down, then we have a separate set of guidelines altogether. And what we have done is actually relied on the CDC guidelines to provide that information. And I would be more than happy to forward what the CDC has published in that regard. Okay. So, I will forward a link to information regarding a facility sanitation, as well as closure of facility and basic guidelines. Okay. Liz, anything else? Yes. What would a procedure for accounting for staff that are out in the field visiting with customers or on job sites? Oh, that's actually going to be more of a communication issue. So, depending on where an incident would occur, let's say, for example, it's a tornado event. And we know that we have got a couple of delivery, you know, folks delivering parts. Maybe one's delivering parts. One's delivering a piece of equipment in that general facility. That will be a situation that we will want to communicate with them. Hey, this is what's been identified. Where are you? Are you being affected by this? And here's the action that we want you to take. Okay. So, you know, your facility, your store may not necessarily be affected in that particular environment. But at the end of the day, you want to make sure that you can communicate with those individuals as they may be affected. And part of that may involve understanding their route plan to get a feel for where they are in transit. But once you do reach them, then at that point, it is imperative to have that conversation with them as far as, you know, again, where are they? Are they affected? And here's what we want you to do in that regard. Based on the information or the intelligence that you have at that point that they may not actually be aware of. Okay. Liz, anything else? No. I think that is it. Thank you, Troy, so much for your time this morning. And to everyone that is listening, we will get those resources out to you in our post-event email. All right. Very good. If I could add to that, again, totally understand, folks. Thanks for taking the time. Definitely appreciate you joining our discussion today. And please stay safe as the country continues to work through the ongoing pandemic situation. Have a great day.

emergency response plans

Troy Tepp

Century Insurance

key components

protecting lives

risk assessment

response procedures