Successful communication of system outage minimises impact on health services

HSV implemented its business continuity plan earlier this month when an outage took the financial management information system (FMIS) offline.

The outage, which happened early on Thursday 5 September, affected our distribution centre’s ability to receive orders from health services through FMIS. Services were back online by 2pm the same day.

HSV’s Logistics team reacted quickly to stand up HSV’s business continuity plan and put in place back-up operations to minimise the impact on health services.

Teams at HSV’s Derrimut distribution centre (DC) manually picked and packed orders to catch up on delayed orders, prioritising same-day orders as normal operations resumed.

Most importantly, the team kept health services informed of developments throughout the day while customer service teams were on hand and ready to support affected customers.

Western Health Supply Services Manager Louise Palermo says she appreciated the frequent updates from the team.

“It meant I could ask my team to conduct checks across our sites to make sure we didn’t have any critical shortages,” she says.

“When we identified a potential shortage of PPE (personal protective equipment) at one of our emergency departments, HSV organised a delivery for us right away.”

Louise, who manages supplies at multiple Western Health sites including Footscray, Sunshine and Williamstown, said the team at HSV handled the situation well.

We were kept updated throughout the day. It was an awful situation, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. From our perspective it had little impact and was resolved very quickly.”

HSV Head of Distribution Centre Operations Josh Lotter says that clear communication was a crucial factor in the execution of HSV’s business continuity plan.

“Our business continuity plan includes this specific scenario, and we were able to flawlessly execute it as a result.”

“Our Customer Engagement and Customer Operations teams notified health services and relevant stakeholders as soon as they became aware of the situation,” he says.

HSV was one of several organisations affected by the outage and health services were able to continue placing orders throughout the day.

“We held crisis meetings between all senior members of the Logistics team every hour between 7am and 2pm,” Josh says.

“We had good collaboration between team leaders and clear communication to senior leaders in the business about affected health services.”

“We’d like to thank health services for their patience and understanding while the system was offline.”

The outage occurred when a cable was severed in the vicinity of the data centre.