Company profile

Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) is a UAE-based conglomerate with interests in bauxite/alumina & primary aluminium smelting. They are the largest industrial company in the country outside the domain of oil/gas.
Some pertinent facts:

  • They have a total of over 7000 employees.
  • Their yearly production of aluminium is nearly 2.34 million units.
  • They have their own regulations & provisions for resilience & emergency management.
  • They follow standards set by both the NCEMA & ISO 22301, including the former’s National Emergency Plan.

The company has plans for expanding significantly, both locally & internationally.

Challenges

The company faced a host of different problems that stood in the way of their planned expansion.
The details:

  • The stability & usability of their system was unacceptable by common industry standards.
  • Their manual business continuity maintenance affected their efficiency & turnover.
  • Their system wasn’t a one-stop shop for all emergency, crisis, & schedule notifications. This resulted in delays in receiving them that, in turn, affected their business negatively.
  • The lack of data flow/interfacing between critical business processes and crisis management mechanisms (facilitated by them manually) resulted in them missing out on identifying critical processes to avert them.
  • Their manual incident/emergency/crisis management meant that the processes were mostly opaque to their decision makers.
  • The lack of customized reporting for operations, middle, & high-level management took a further toll on their efficacy.

The above subsequently resulted in their system failing to live up to many of NCEMA’s & ISO 22301’s aforementioned standards.

Solution

Upon choosing Ascent Business, we set them up with our Ascent AutoBCM service. Here are some of its salient features:

  • Its continuity management lifecycle is implementable end-to-end.
  • The solution has its own provisions for disaster recovery planning & crisis/incident management.
  • Its emergency response & related notifications are all automated.
  • It’s not only highly scalable, but can be deployed either in-house or on a cloud with minimal maintenance.
  • Its BCM cycle (including BIA, BCP, RA recovery etc) is fully automated.
  • The service comes with a user-friendly chat feature to enable better collaborations.
  • All necessary dashboards and reporting systems are also included in the system.

Results

Ascent AutoBCM brought a host of different benefits to the issues faced by the company. The ways in which it helped have been listed as follows:

  • It improved their operational efficiency, besides significantly increasing process visibility to the company’s top management.
  • It allowed for effective tracking & resolution of issues.
  • It made the organization at large aware of continuity issues through its mass notification feature.
  • It enabled quick & accurate aggregation of data & information at an enterprise-level.
  • It allowed for the identification of gaps between BCM resource requirements & their availability.
  • Decision-makers could now track the process in real-time regardless of operating location.
  • Crisis management response, logging, & reporting became far more effective & accessible.
  • Decision-making processes inside the company were enhanced through an increased visibility for real events.
  • Its automated messaging allowed for 24/7 connectivity between any number of people, enabling a far more pro-active & collaborative response to emergency situations.

All of the above & much more allowed for the company to finally achieve their necessary regulatory compliances, hence finally enabling them to pursue their expansionary goals.