Background
KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology brings together students, researchers, and educators worldwide, across its five campuses. Its legacy incident reporting solution, however, was low tech. Reported incidents had to be transferred between systems when security staff returned from patrols, basic analysis reports took days to produce so presumptions were often made about incident hotspots. The university needed a modern, scalable solution.
Challenge
Digitalize incident reporting and analysis from multiple campuses in line with strict regulatory requirements, while supporting roadmap for new functions.
Solution
Exonaut is an innovative tool for organizations that want to take a proactive approach to reporting, monitoring, and analyzing incidents.
Benefits
Incident reporting time has been reduced by 50 percent, management can easily view, understand, and make decisions using intuitive operation reports.
Customer
KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology has 17,000 students, over 5,000 employees and five campuses located throughout Stockholm, Sweden. Established in 1827, notable alumni include Alfred Nobel, the founder of the Nobel Prize and Astronaut Christer Fuglesang.
Physical and technical security
KTH, The Royal Institute of Technology is a large organization where researchers generate sensitive, cutting-edge research data daily. It’s also a very public organization, with its five campuses accessible to students, staff and the public. This poses a combination of physical and technical security challenges and threats.
Digitalizing incident reporting
A new solution was required that could improve and streamline incident reporting and promote a proactive approach to security to minimize the risks of flood or fire damages, theft, vandalism, unauthorized access and other emergencies, while increasing public safety on campus.
“Our existing system involved a lot of time-consuming manual processes and wasn’t delivering the insights of a modern digital solution,” says the Security Specialist at KTH Security and Safety Department (SSD). “We scanned the market and identified the features we wanted from the different providers. 4C Strategies’ Exonaut was hands-down the best option available for our needs.”
Empowering security operations
These needs included features such as a centralized database storing all information; an app with geotagging capabilities, forms, incident instructions, and reporting that instantly register events centrally in the system; incident ticketing workflows, and intuitive dashboards and heatmaps that convey incidents, statistics, and trends across all sites. The system also had to be user-friendly, meet strict regulatory requirements, and easily scale in line with KTH’s digital roadmap. This includes new incident and crisis management capabilities including automated escalation, in app checklist and automated notifications and action plans for security staff, additional third-party integrations, and more.
Efficiency gains – increased security
“We have achieved considerable benefits since we started using Exonaut,” he continues. “Incident reporting times have been halved, which obviously gives our team much more time to focus on security activities. Heat maps visualize where most incidents occur. Previously, we were making educated guesses, but with Exonaut we have the facts from over 100 touchpoints to back it up and can be more proactive in our security activities. In fact, based on the data from Exonaut, we have been able to use our resources more efficiently and increase our presence with surveillance actions and other safety and security precautions in areas and at times where it’s most needed.”
Efficiency gains – faster decision-making
“In Exonaut’s dashboards we can get a quick overview or filter incidents by date, time, category or subcategory,” he explains. “This allows us to visualize data and generate reports on anything from daily campus incident reports to an annual trend report that includes all five campuses – reports that were tedious and very time consuming to compile in the past. These simplify decision-making for senior management, who don’t have to spend valuable time sifting through long reports anymore. The reports can also be a great support for auditors, emergency services, and the University´s service providers.”
Professional and customer focused partner
Deployment of Exonaut was a smooth process. Training was held for the different users of the software, and KTH has a support contract with access to the Exonaut helpdesk when needed. “Vendors you can truly rely on is critical for the success of our operations. 4C are a professional and customer-focused provider of resilience software and expertise – the ideal partner to help and advise us in our transformation journey,” concludes the Security Specialist at SSD.
