Dealing with Covid-19 in multinational environment – First Swiss Chapter Webinar

Encouraged by the ongoing COVID-19 confinement, and facilitated by a Zoom license made available by the ASIS International organization, the ASIS-160/Switzerland Chapter did instrument on May 5, 2020 a first and very successful webinar featuring Cédrick Moriggi, Global Head of Security and Resilience for LafargeHolcim (LH). LH is a multinational company operating in 72 countries through approx. 2000 facilities/plants, employing 70'000 employees and around same number of contractors, providing cement-based products (cement, aggregates, ready mix, projects) worldwide.

The idea was to highlight the exemplary approach chosen by this large international industrial group to face the COVID-19 continuous developments and in the first place to protect its employees and contractors. Interestingly enough, while the production facilities must never be shut down, the group's stated ambitious strategy in such a pandemic situation is to protect "people, people, people, and then its assets and its reputation".

For Cédrick Moriggi, in view of his operational responsibilities, it is mainly a question of balancing over many long weeks the health and safety expectations of the Board and the needs of the employees according to a logic of 3 strategic streams (health, cash & costs) and local follow-up. Such a “think global and act local” logic is intended to take into account the company-wide’s ecosystem but also the local cultures, specificities and constraints.

Deployed over 3 years to favor an efficient contingency and recovery scheme, a maturity concept has been instrumented in order to link predefined trigger phases with local response and action plans. This approach leverages a corporate business continuity "Bowtie" schematic as the further you can prepare in advance, the shorter your response and recovery will be. Cédrick noticed that such crisis type requires an efficient data-driven measurement and reporting process to facilitate a quick and relevant decision making.

Also essential for Cédrick is a continuous, concise and swift communication to all staff allowing the response teams to focus on their core responsibilities and to keep people embarked in sharing the risks and the associated plans.
Thanks to Cédrick Moriggi’s obvious professional passion, his natural leadership and especially his willingness to be transparent about the LH methods and tools, this first webinar proved to be very insightful and interesting for all participants, as demonstrated by the many questions and the answers provided.

Jean-Pierre Therre & Etienne Ammon, May 2020