Background: Recognising the increasingly interconnected nature of crisis management in the food sector, an inter-agency protocol was established to connect eight government agencies in Ireland for a more unfiied crisis response. New roles, responsibilities and inter-agency collaboration demanded training and exercises for all participating agencies and stakeholders.
Challenge: The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) had a need to test a new inter-agency protocol for ‘the management of a food crisis’ with six other government agencies and authorities that would be part of the response. The key challenge was bringing together numerous stakeholders from different locations in Ireland for the exercise planning, delivery and evaluation.
Solution: Exonaut provided a simple and transparent tool to design, deliver and evaluate the complex, distributed food safety exercise in real-time. 4C’s exercise team engaged over 200 players and 40 exercise control staff in 8 locations across Ireland. The findings were recorded in real-time in our supporting software suite, Exonaut.
Benefits: Exonaut enabled the effective management of a complex, distributed, simulation exercise, providing situational awareness of the many moving parts of the scenario alongside real-time observations against the exercise objectives by a team of evaluators. Within an hour of completing the exercise, all exercise data was compiled and ready to use as an instrumental part of the debriefings across all participating groups across Ireland.
Customer: Food Safety Authority of Ireland, the statutory body responsible for ensuring food produced, distributed or marketed in Ireland complies with food safety and hygiene standards, best practice codes and legal requirements.
