Sphere
#35
2014
12
>>
on earth. Lying on a major fault line prone to
earthquakes, they also have a front-row seat to
every typhoon coming out of the deep Pacific.
Recent experience has provided no respite.
The Philippines have been wrecked by
severe natural calamities of late. The
Manila flooding last summer, Typhoon
Haiyan and a massive earthquake all
happened last year. Controller of Internal
Audit and Loss Prevention for Watsons
in the Philippines, Ms Myracris Cordova,
has seen a higher rate of natural disasters
hitting the country in recent years, and
the company reacted by establishing a
programme of training early last year.
The training is new, developed by the
company itself and based on their own
experience of handling crises. They have
had ample opportunity to put this training
to use. “The impact of Haiyan on Watsons
was very, very small,” says Myracris and
she credits this to their training. Haiyan
inflicted approximately USD1.5 billion
of financial loss on the nation, but only
minimal damage to Watsons.
High-level managers and store supervisors
attend a training workshop once a year
on crisis management policy, evacuation
policy and more. Store supervisors brief
their respective staff in stores about
what they should do to prepare for an
oncoming crisis. A bulletin board in every
store is updated twice a month to provide
the frontline staff with the latest details
concerning emergency contacts and
evacuation points. Weather alerts and
trends are also on the board. With most of
Watsons’ stores located in malls, Myracris
explains that drills are held by the malls in
March and November every year.
Prior to Haiyan’s savaging of The Philippines,
Watsons set up a Crisis Management
Committee and held conference calls with
each controller who headed a response
team across the nation. The priority was
the safety of the employees and they were
told to stay at home if commuting to work
was too dangerous. Valuable goods and
safes were relocated to higher shelves. A
well-defined systemwas put in place for the
ease of making insurance claims. And as it
turned out, loss of inventory was reduced and
recovery was speedy. For instance, the two
Watsons stores submerged in the Manila
flooding last August were back in operation
within one month.
These procedures didn’t arise from
serendipitous epiphany. They were derived
from hard-earned lessons that drove
change. Myracris’s team needed to up
their game after the 2009 Manila flooding,
when training procedures had yet to be
designed. Lost and damaged product
accounting, inventory control for insurance
purposes and even employee contact
procedures were implemented to instil
confidence and get to the level of disaster
readiness the team now enjoys.
A radical overhaul in procedures, well-
established training programmes, and
diligence in repetitive drilling mean the teams
now know what to do in the event of almost
any disaster. Having learned from the past,
they are well prepared for the future.
HPH’s 27,000 daily
reasons to train
Hutchison Port Holdings Limited
(HPH) plays a key role in the continuing
development of 52 ports around the world
and Hong Kong is among the busiest.
In Hong Kong, Hongkong International
Terminals Limited (HIT) has a staggering
daily average of 27,000 container
movements. To maintain order over this
Be Prepared
