Abbott Laboratories staffs crisis management center to assist employees, customers

It’s hardly typical real estate for a global medical supply manufacturer.

The command center at Abbott Laboratories’ corporate headquarters.

But in that command center, adjacent to a glass-walled soundproof conference room, a small team of business risk analysts tracks weather patterns and world events and news that may impact more than 68,000 employees in 130 countries around the globe and the supply channels of customers. Whenever hot spots erupt – around the clock and around the world – the team springs into action, notifying employees and making extraction or support plans for them, as well as ensuring customer service remains open and fluid.

Abbott executives don’t freely or widely promote this operation. In fact, few media outlets even have seen or are aware of its existence.

Yet, in an exclusive interview with Healthcare Purchasing News, which also toured the crisis management center, Jim Murphy, Abbott’s director, Global Crisis Management, Business Continuity Planning and Emergency Preparedness, pulled back the curtain just enough to highlight Abbott’s secret weapon in the vast area of asset management. He admitted that customers and business partners who are granted access to the center "are more comfortable after they’ve seen what we do," he said.

"At Abbott, we have taken an ‘all hazards’ approach to emergency/disaster preparedness – versus a focus on a specific scenario," Murphy said. "Our program has been designed to prepare us for natural disasters, man-made and abnormal events, which occur globally. Our crisis management team plans and practices for a crisis on a global basis throughout the year, so when an actual event occurs, we are prepared and ready to go into action. Preparation is critical in ensuring that when an event occurs, we are able to supply our customers, protect our employees and help the communities where we work and live."

Because communications remains one of the most integral and interrupted services during a crisis, Abbott maintains a distributed network of information technology and telecommunications technologies to alert/contact its crisis teams globally, according to Murphy. Tools include satellite phones, rapid notification software, mobile and landline communications.

Abbott also has developed, and continues to develop, a portfolio of business continuity plans that outline how the company would recover a manufacturing site after an event occurs.

Much of the planning for this began in 2003, when "we established a crisis management team starting at the executive level and then built regional and country-specific multi-functional teams where we had a significant operational or market presence," Murphy said. "We created a crisis management process that applies to all Abbott sites worldwide allowing locations or regions impacted by an event to easily and rapidly engage the crisis network to obtain the support and/or resources necessary for quick recovery."

Murphy noted that his group remains in constant contact with healthcare providers to help them continue to meet patient needs. The group’s crisis management process also involves protecting and caring for Abbott employees in trouble spots. Those plans recently were enacted during the California wildfires and the China earthquake, he added.

Abbott makes sure that all crisis management plans and processes, as well as the teams that implement them, are educated, trained and ready for action via intensive drilling, according to Murphy. "We train and practice with our crisis teams frequently throughout the year," he said. "Tabletop exercises are used extensively to provide experience for the teams with the Abbott crisis management process, practice a particular scenario, such as a hurricane, earthquake, wildfire, pandemic, etc., as well as identify gaps in a particular plan or within a country so that they can be addressed.

To evaluate how supply chain management operations would function during a potential crisis, Murphy offered a simple plan. "The first step is being able to identify where there are potential weak points and how to mitigate them," he said. "It’s not a science. It’s common sense and hard work and contingency planning."

It’s a lesson from which hospitals can learn to improve communications, supply chain operations, staffing and patient care.

"Our crisis management team plans and practices for a crisis on a global basis throughout the year, so when an actual event occurs, we are prepared and ready to go into action," he continued. "We regularly train and exercise our teams." That includes cross-training participants, changing team members mid-stream and throwing in curve balls to intensify an event and evaluate reactions. "Our mantra: Less paper, more practice," he added.

In fact, that’s Murphy’s solution to dealing with panic when an event occurs: "Practice, practice, practice," he emphasized.

Through such disasters as Hurricane Katrina, Murphy said they’ve learned about closed roads and stifled transportation routes, as well as the need to pre-position products with partners very early on in at least a half dozen locations.

Murphy had just returned from Germany and Spain where he ran drills and exercises for Abbott employees in those European countries.

As far as Abbott has come with its functioning global crisis management network in operation, however, Murphy still insists they have work to do – even on those non-eventful days.