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Follow UsWal-Mart Stores Inc. had learned its lesson. Before
Hurricane Katrina hit, Wal-Mart had dealt with Hurricane Charlie. Alarmed by its
lack of visibility into the state of some stores during that storm, it created a
new approach to disasters that paid off during the even more catastrophic
Katrina.
Wal-Mart CIO Linda Dillman, shares the experience
of how the company's IT team reacted to the disaster and how its previous
experiences helped shape its response.
When Hurricane Charlie hit Florida last year,
Dillman was alarmed by the lack of visibility into affected stores. It was the
first time Dillman realized the extent to which the Information Systems Division
could lose visibility into the damage at stores and whereabouts of employees in
affected areas. It was Wal-Mart's wake-up call to get better prepared to track
lost power, network coverage, and cellular phone communications after a disaster
strikes.
Before Katrina, Wal-Mart had built what it calls
an emergency operations center designed to allow--even force--employees from
different departments to work in close proximity during a disaster. Katrina put
it to the test. By having people work in the operations center, it let people
from multiple parts of the company make decisions and set priorities on what
tasks and systems were most important. "When you go through a crisis
similar to Hurricane Katrina, the pharmacy system is as critical as anything
else we'll do," Dillman said.
Wal-Mart also utilized a dashboard system
developed for the operations center that gives the company the visibility it
lacked--showing each store's damage, whether employees were at risk or injured,
and if the store has communications platforms running and whether they're
running on landlines or satellite systems or utility or generator power.
Despite its planning, Wal-Mart's IT team had to
improvise as well. Employees set up mobile pharmacies facilities to fill
prescriptions for people dislocated by the storm, and Wal-Mart needed to connect
those to a group of pharmacists at Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to
fill prescriptions, because the demand at those mobile sites was so high,
Dillman said.
Wal-Mart also set up emergency lines for
employees to call in, trying to account for all its employees and connect them
to family members. Calls quickly exceeded 2,500 daily, swamping the existing
call center and forcing the IT team to build a new one in a few hours. Wal-Mart
also launched a Web site where employees and others in the affected area can
post messages to friends and family. When it proved popular, the company
expanded it for use by non-employees. Said Dillman, "There have been 40,000
messages posted and more than 2 million hits to the site."