Safely enjoying Dekmantel Festival

Background

Dekmantel Festival is one of the leading electronic music festivals. Every year, connoisseurs from all over the world flock to Amsterdamse Bos for three days of groundbreaking music. The reputable website Resident Advisor proclaimed Dekmantel Festival the best festival in the month of August several times in a row. It truly is an international success story. Not only because of the extraordinary programming – it exceeds expectations for how a large festival should run.

The organization pays a lot of attention to less visible parts of the event. Dekmantel leaves nothing to chance when it comes information management, risk management and operational safety. In 2014, the festival site had to be cleared due to a storm. This was the reason for Dekmantel to secure safety plans for everyone involved even better.

Questions from Dekmantel

• How do we ensure that everyone involved knows their role in the continuity and safety of the festival?
• How do we ensure that everybody has the right information as soon as possible? Especially in the event of an incident or emergency?
• How do we ensure that all mandatory checks have actually been ticked off before our doors open?
• How do we register all reports coming in at the command center and how do we quickly share them with all parties involved?
• How do we improve reports so we take can evaluation to the next level?

Our solutions

For a smart configuration of information management, we started mapping the organization: what does it look like? And which roles play a part in ensuring safety and continuity? We converted all information relevant to these roles into the app. By linking information to specific roles, the organization ensures that everybody has the most recent updates at any time of the day.

It all starts with a risk analysis

A good risk analysis generates a number of tasks. Checks of the emergency exits for example, but also checks of the equipment for a bad weather scenario and checks. Even a check on any peculiar details on social media. Some roles have specific tasks. For example, a stage manager checks whether there’s an approved fire extinguisher on stage. These tasks have to be completed before the festival doors open. And the organization sees exactly if that’s the case, since employees check off all completed tasks in the app.

Those checks keep coming during the festival. An hour before the headliner starts the set, for example: are the bars replenished? Is there plenty of staff available? And are the extra security guards in position? The right people see these tasks at the right time. Simply through notifications in the app.

All reports on safety, security, organization, traffic and first aid come in at the festival’s command room. These are all registered in a cloud-based log. This creates a complete picture of everything happening on and around the festival. It enables the organization to make improvements during the event. Such a complete log also comes in handy during the evaluation afterwards.

According to safety plans

Through various dashboards organizers have a clear picture of the organization at any time. Whether they’re at home or walking around the festival grounds, they’re able to see exactly which tasks have been completed. Or they can check notifications sorted by location or theme. And the risk dashboard immediately shows whether the organization is in line with safety plans and risk analyzes.