Westfield Group
Our operations are headquartered in Westfield Center, Ohio in-between Akron and Cleveland with approximately 2,500 employees of which roughly 1,400 work at our Home Office location. We are a national organization and have a presence forty-one (41) service offices in thirty-one (31) states. Westfield is one of the largest non-public companies in Ohio and the largest employer in Medina County, and has $3.5 billion in consolidated assets and $1.4 billion in written premium. We are the largest writer of contract performance bonds in Ohio, and among the top writers of farm business in the United States.
So enough about the organization, let’s talk about business continuity and Crisis Commander. Westfield’s BC program has been in-effect for over six years at least from a full-time staff perspective. Our initial plans and program while developed by outside consultants were good, but they were Microsoft Office suite-based and the maintenance and administration was a bear.
After an extensive RFP process that had us look at and demo six systems, we came to the realization and decision that the ease-of-use, web-based option and functionality of Crisis Commander was the perfect and necessary complement that Westfield was looking for and needed. While there are other systems in the market whose name you may know better, Crisis Commander was the one-stop solution that helped our program ascend to the next level to continue our growth and maturity that’s so vital to our continued operations and success in the event of an interruption.
Crisis Commander’s theme of Communicate, Coordinate, Collaborate is especially relevant to Westfield as the system helps us tremendously from a plan maintenance and administration point-of-view, and the tools and functionality have truly enhanced our program and our ability to respond and recover from an interruption as we found-out this past mid-June when we had a power outage and used Crisis Commander to manage the interruption and minimize the impact to Westfield’s employees, our customer, and Westfield’s assets. Having a tool like Crisis Commander when experiencing an interruption has totally validated any ROI that internal folks, such as auditors, look for
In addition to using Crisis Commander for dealing real-time during interruptions, we’ve also created a proactive portal to communicate information to employees through Crisis Commander’s embedded crisis web-site creation and management. This feature has been an interesting and beneficial avenue of information where we’ve seen an immediate value. Additionally, the notification tool now offers Westfield the ability to share information and details about an interruption to our targeted audience quickly and effectively whether by text-to-voice, text messaging and/or e-mail.
The system is designed to be very user-friendly. I am Westfield’s BC department and am therefore also the administrator of the system, yet I have also leveraged my critical team leaders to also be knowledgeable in Crisis Commander. And, when needed, the technical support has been available to aid in FAQs and any issue that may arise.
All-in-all, the choice to purchase Crisis Commander has been very positive for Westfield. The organization’s resiliency is in good hands with Crisis Commander as we now have the necessary tools to help structure our program.
– Rod Keeley, Business Continuity Manager, Westfield Group