Announcements and Notifications

Communicating important information to a range of people is vital in any business. When sending information in response to issues and events it is important to ensure that recipients are immediately notified of critical changes which require urgent attention.

The ability to have clear and effective communication with instant alerts will reduce liability. As well as seeing who has been notified about an issue, it can also be very important to be able to monitor who has not received an alert.

The ICON Solution

ICON's 'Announcements' solution allows the tracking and notification of information being disseminated to groups of interested parties.

ICON recognised that it is necessary to have different alert levels for different types of announcements. with a standards set-up the system has three alerts levels:

• Low priority: a system message displayed when logging in to the ICON System.

• Medium Priority: as above and also an email is sent from the system to users' email addresses.

• High Priority: as both above and also a text message is sent to users' mobile phones.

All of the above notifications give the users a brief headline of the issue; the system holding the full details of the announcement.

Benefits

• Clear communication

• Allows administrators to send alerts to time critical situations

• Reduces liability

• Can be used to communication knowledge and best practice between groups of users

• Contact a whole user group, or pre-defined sets of users, at the click of a button.

Configuration

• The solution can be used for any type of alert or notification

• Alert types are template driven and can therefore be configured to record and send whatever information is needed

• The communication subject is entirely up to the administrator.

Security

• The system only lets users see what they need to see

• The administrator retains full control over who can issue an Announcement

• The solution integrates with existing user profiles in the ICON System it is configured on

• Different users groups can be set-up by different announcement type i.e. Employees, Suppliers, Consultants, etc.

The Solution In Action

Before the administrator sends out an announcement an 'Update PDF' option automatically creates a PDF of all the information in the announcement.

This PDF file can be configured to a format already used by the client so that when the system is introduced it is a layout that recipients are already familiar with.

Each time the PDF is updated it is available straight away for the recipients to download. If the announcement is updated a number of times whilst the alert is still in place (for example it may take a few days for an incident to be resolved), the PDF file is versioned so it is possible to track back through the progress of the alert.

Once the PDF has been updated the Announcement is ready to be sent. This is done by clicking a ‘Notify’ button. This automatically displays the all users from the team that was selected when creating the Announcement. If needed, additional users and / or teams can be selected, or removed.

When the Announcement has been sent, users will be directed straight to the Announcement and will be able to view the PDF created.

The final part of the process is the creation of a status report. If a text alert is sent it usually requires urgent attention and is imperative that all users have received the text message. The status report shows a list of all recipients and the status of the text message, being ‘successful’ or 'un-successful'.

Select Announcement Type i.e. Health & Safety Incident, or the desired Announcement type.

Fill out information as appropriate.

In the notification section specify the announcement type.

The announcement is immediately available as a PDF.

Select team users, then send the announcement when ready.