John Lewis has developed and patented its own
internet-based crisis management system after failing to find a
suitable product on the market.
The system was tested in a simulated crisis management trial in
February and has since been used successfully in a real crisis, the
retailer said.
The system, Crisis Commfile, was developed by two in-house
developers; one business continuity practitioner and one
programmer.
It provides real-time shared communications between mul-tiple
locations during an emergency, allowing those responsible for
resolving the crisis to view current and past dialogue.
"Our objective was to create a facility with a highly intuitive
user-friendly interface that could use a very low bandwidth
connection with minimum penalty in speed but offering high security
and demanding no formal budget," a spokeswoman for John Lewis
said.
"We built it ourselves because we could not find anything that
brought together the tools and data we needed to help manage our
progress through a crisis.
"We regard resilient, sequenced, time-stamped, searchable
communication as being of critical importance in the management of
what could be a fast evolving crisis," she said.
The web-based system runs Microsoft IIS on Windows 2003 using
ASP.net and C# code. The retailer used rapid application
development techniques to produce a prototype and develop it into a
full enterprise application.
Retailers go on 'war footing' >>