ADM and its security team tapped into existing data, both inside the company and publicly available, to enable informed decision-making and real-time insight into the company’s pandemic response plan including contact tracing, location insight and information, and facility occupancy.

ADM Unlocks the Power of Existing Data for COVID-19 Response

Founded in 1902, ADM works across the global food supply chain as a human and animal nutrition provider and agricultural origination and processing company, serving 200 countries and connecting crops to markets on six continents. Headquartered in Chicago, the company has more than 800 facilities, 38,000 employees, and $64 billion in revenue.

Kevin Wujek, Insider Threat Coordinator, originally came from an accounting background when he started working for ADM’s Global Security team seven years ago. Over the years, he’s managed regulatory programs as well as worked on the company’s Insider Risk team. He now manages several of ADM’s government-regulated security programs as well as its global Insider Risk program. And he has taught himself a number of skills and competencies over his tenure to grow with the company’s ever-changing security needs, particularly over the past year and a half.

When COVID-19 became a reality, Wujek became indispensable to the organization in enabling ADM to continue business across the enterprise’s extremely varied sites, providing data that was meaningful for the organization’s leaders to continue to tweak and adjust its pandemic response. Working closely with a number of departments, Wujek and his team have repurposed and reimagined data in a way that has allowed enterprise management to make tough pandemic-related decisions, as well as ensure business continuity.

In the early stages of ADM’s pandemic response, the company implemented several aspects of its Crisis Leadership Plan, including regional incident management teams throughout the globe, a global incident management team, and a core crisis leadership team.

At first, the security team was providing weekly reports for a select few high-priority locations. “But as time went on, the list of locations continued to grow and it was becoming increasingly difficult to manually collect data and present findings for an ever-expanding list of locations,” Wujek says.

Although information was available through multiple sources and websites, ADM management needed a means to collect, organize and digitize salient and reliable information, as well as provide the data in a digestible format with real-time insight for more informed, targeted decision-making regarding risk evaluation and business continuity.

To meet the need, Wujek set out to develop a dashboard using publicly available information — similar to what he’d seen from Johns Hopkins University, COVID-Tracking Project, The Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, CDC and more — where ADM’s executives could view each location’s pandemic status, including various restrictions, projected opening dates and other metrics.

Wujek worked with global security intelligence colleagues to develop a Return-to-Workplace risk assessment tool for all offices and facilities worldwide, allowing for rapid and real-time evaluation of the work environment that exceeded any previous expectations management had on what they could learn. The dashboard includes several different pandemic-related metrics, including case growth, COVID-19 testing and positivity rates, and hospitalization rates at a local level. The information gives senior leadership incredible visibility not only to office and facility locations, but to surrounding county locations where colleagues and company employees reside.

“We took publicly accessible state and county-level data, and then developed and applied our own scoring algorithm based on current CDC health recommendations. Our scoring system enabled our management teams to process multiple, dynamic data sets in a much more understandable way with a highly user-friendly interface,” he says. Employees can view ADM’s dashboard through a browser or via mobile device, selecting by locality to quickly see current and historical “composite score” on a simple range defined by severity.

The localized insight has allowed ADM’s leaders to make more informed assessments and decisions regarding operations and COVID-19 response.

Wujek also aided the development of ADM’s Real-Time Facility Occupancy Dashboard, which repurposes data from the company’s card access control system, providing managers with detailed real-time information on occupancy, including the number of in-office colleagues per team, per floor and more.

“The simple solution allows management actionable data they can rely on — and you can appreciate how valuable this data is for contact tracing and population density decision-making related to return-to-office discussions,” Wujek says.

As sites opened or continued to operate and evaluate conditions and outbreaks, ADM leaders soon realized the company needed a more centralized approach to tracking quarantined employees and determining employee scheduling and hiring. Although teams throughout the world were tracking the number of colleagues who had contracted COVID-19, the data wasn’t separate and categorized to give senior managers insight regarding which mitigation measures were working best in various environments such as manufacturing facilities, research labs, facility labs, offices, etc. Wujek worked with HR to access databases, which allowed executives better insight into this tracking globally and provided a centralized database for data of quarantined or infected employees.

“The solution provided our Transportation and HR teams with the tracking and visibility necessary to enable effective quarantine management and workforce-planning decisions,” Wujek says.

Much of Wujek and the team’s aid in operational efficiency has come from streamlining work processes and procedures and encompassing existing data and technologies that the company already had, with little to no additional investments.

Wujek also worked with Global Security’s travel security analysts and IT operations to develop an approval workflow process for business-critical travel to review travel justifications and ensure high-risk travel was addressed consistently and appropriately. The digitization of the process has also allowed senior executives to see various analytics and reporting surrounding the travel data.

Collecting and presenting actionable, meaningful data that continues to meet ADM’s information needs has not only elevated Wujek’s status as an irreplaceable member of the enterprise, but it has continued to prove the Global Security team’s value as a business enabler and allowed the security team to be involved at every level of the company’s response to COVID-19 and impact on the organization.

“Our collective work in creating these dashboards has allowed data to serve as a unifying force for our global teams,” Wujek shares. “We continue to work closely with all operations teams (for business continuity), business analytics, supply chain/procurement, human resources, data scientists, microbiologists, transportation as well as environment health and safety colleagues.”