My first exposure to computers and incident reporting systems was back in the mid-80s when I was a corporate security advisor to the City of Edmonton. The city’s IT department was relocating to new offices and the corporate security group was tasked to provide physical security expertise to the project. During the process, a mutual respect developed between us.

After the project was completed, they encouraged us to pursue launching a centralized corporate loss reporting system. They even offered, at no cost to us, to develop the product, install it on their mainframe connected to Sperry terminals on all our desks. It was the proverbial offer that could not be refused.

The IT department’s motivation was not completely altruistic, they wanted to broaden their influence on computer usage across city departments and to do that they needed broad adoption of technology. At the time, the predominant use of computer technology was for payroll purposes.

Coincidental with becoming somewhat “computer literate” I became an active volunteer with ASIS International. Together with colleagues I started the first ASIS chapter in Canada, Chapter #156, the Edmonton Chapter. We were embraced and encouraged at every turn by the leadership of ASIS. I held many volunteer positions before being elected to the 1987 board of directors. And, to the Executive Committee as the International Vice President in 1988.

In December 1988, two years into my three-year term, I had to resign from the board when I became the president and CEO of PPM; vendors were not allowed to be on the ASIS board in those days. I remained active as a volunteer, serving on the Professional Certification Board and the ASIS Foundation.

My experience with the City of Edmonton’s Loss Reporting Program and the exposure I got to the security industry across the globe through ASIS gave me the insight and courage I needed to start a business; PPM 2000 Inc. was launched in 1988.

For the next 25 years I worked tirelessly through ups and downs to chart PPM’s progress to becoming the global leader in the incident reporting space. When PPM was acquired by a Toronto based private equity company in 2014, it counted 20% of the Fortune 100 including companies like Microsoft and Amazon among its thousands of customers.

After selling PPM 2000 I embraced retirement but ultimately I became restless; in late 2018 I and three former PPM colleagues started exploring the possibility of launching a new company to develop an incident reporting software that was affordable, simplified and still have the functionality expected by the marketplace.

Previous experience taught us that creating a detailed product specification to guide development was not the best way to proceed. Instead, we created a “dumb” navigable user interface prototype so we could see what the finished product would look and feel like before investing the money, time, and effort to develop the product and create the infrastructure that would support the business.

The prototype exceeded our expectations. So, we incorporated Incident Xpress in March of 2019.

From day one our focus was to keep operating costs to a minimum to be able to offer the product at the lowest subscription cost possible. This meant no bricks and mortar offices and no employees during the startup phase. Instead the founders, who together had more than 60 years of incident reporting expertise, decided to take on the development, marketing, and finance responsibilities without compensation. I took on the mantle of Managing Director, Gerry McCracken – Finance Director, Cora Bolianatz – Marketing Director and Danny Oh – Development Director.

2020 will forever be embedded in our memories as the year the Coronavirus pandemic spread rapidly around the world and closed the global economy. Instead of the planned launch date of early April, we decided to delay the release until early fall and use the extra time for further testing and tweaking.

The final product is testament to the depth and comprehensiveness of the combined experience of the founders, especially Danny Oh, who led the Incident Xpress development team. His experience in incident reporting applications together with his experience in the development of mobile apps for a large financial services company resulted in a quality product that is simplified, affordable and comprehensive.

Incident Xpress is committed to being the most transparent incident reporting company in the marketplace. Everything a subscriber would want to know before investing in the product is accessible on our website, including pricing. All prospective customers can “Try before you buy” for 30 days before committing to a subscription plan. Subscribers can cancel at any time effective the anniversary date of their subscription term.

Security of a customer’s data while stored on the server and during transmission is essential. Incident Xpress Inc. selected Microsoft Azure Cloud Services to be our service provider. The security afforded by Microsoft surpasses what most companies can do themselves. They invested over one billion dollars and employed more than 3,000 cyber security experts to make their cloud services reliable and secure.

Entering a new incident in Incident Xpress is a breeze. The flow is logical – When (did it happen), What (happened), Where (did it happen), Why (did it happen), Who (was involved). A summary section allows the documentation of how incidents unfold, and an attachment section stores photographs, drawings, notes, witness and victim statements, investigator notes, copies of trespass warnings, etc. Corrective Action can be documented before an incident is closed.

Every incident reporting application needs a champion user to oversee configuring and deploying it. We refer to this person as the System Administrator or SA. Every effort has been made to make this person’s job as easy as possible.

A subscriber can select the Incident Xpress default setup that best fits their organization from four versions – corporate, education, healthcare, and hospitality. Each of these industry verticals comes preconfigured to suit their operations. Editing how these preconfigured verticals uniquely applies to an organization or region is super easy.

Incident Xpress was designed to be flexible in meeting the needs of an organization no matter how small or how complex it is. The basis for this flexibility is organizing users into workgroups. The default structure, which is totally editable, is four workgroups however there is no limit to the number of workgroups or users. Level one is the head of security and his or her System Administrator. Level 2 is for security managers who have slightly less privileges than Level 1. Level 3 is for investigators/supervisors and Level 4 is for security officers.

An important benefit of any incident reporting system is its ability to search, report and perform analysis. Incident Xpress starts users off with the most common search and analysis criteria preconfigured accessible by selecting a thumbnail in the dashboard or reports section.

Wherever possible, to ensure consistency of data entered, users select from lookup lists to populate fields. Preconfigured lookup lists are used for: what happened, where did it happen, person types, referral agencies and department names.

Incident reports may become evidence in a court case. For this reason, the accuracy and validity of a report’s content is critical. This is where the audit feature comes in. Search incidents to see the history of edits made and by who. Or use audit to track a user’s movements through the system; when they logged in, what searches they performed and which incidents they went into.

Incident Xpress can be programmed to auto-email a notification to a specific person or persons who need to know when a serious incident occurs.

A user with the appropriate privileges can also adjust the subscription settings at anytime giving them instant access to additional user licenses or the ability to switch or cancel plans. We wanted to put the customer in control from the beginning.

Most of the leading incident reporting systems today are so complicated that they rely on expensive consultants and trainers to help customers configure and deploy the product in their organization. Instead, to reduce cost of ownership, Incident Xpress Inc. chose to make four preconfigured verticals – corporate, education, healthcare, and hospitality – that are easily adaptable to any organization broadly falling into one of these verticals. Also, to keep ownership costs low, instead of relying on trainers to teach them how to use the system, we’ve dedicated significant effort to providing all the guides, tutorial videos, and knowledge base articles.

An important part of the vision for Incident Xpress Inc. is the creation of a collaborative Help Center where IXI and our customers create a community to answer questions, provide helpful end user suggestions and collaborate on ideas for product improvement.

When we decided to create Incident Xpress Inc. as a virtual company, we couldn’t in our wildest imaginations have foreseen the Covid 19 pandemic. But the arrival of Covid 19 at the beginning of 2020 caused us to revisit our vision and refine our focus on maximizing our business model to ensure “low to no touch.”

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