Toronto firm introduces app-based emergency management solution

Image courtesy BYND

Toronto-based public safety software company BYND says it is changing the way companies access their emergency plans through their PlanConnect mobile application.

BYND founders Brett Reddock and Robb Shallow, who come from a background in emergency management and disaster response, discovered that a mobile-based emergency management solution has been a want for customers for quite some time.

“We had discussions with customers who planted the seed and gave us the idea that it was something that they would see as a favourable and a better approach to having paper-based plan,” Reddock said in a recent interview with Canadian Security.

“Ultimately, [BYND] just came from doing plans, working with existing customers and from discussions with those customers and clients came to me.”

Using both technical and practical knowledge, Reddock and Shallow put their efforts towards BYND’s PlanConnect mobile application.

PlanConnect allows users to have all of their emergency management plans stored in one place and can be accessible anytime and anywhere without Internet connectivity.

Some key features of the app include auto event recording, incident dashboard analytics, tenant engagements, as well as multi plan access.

“Our application can change its design and structure, so it is more nimble, to address the different types of plans that exist in the different ways,” Reddock says.

Sharing that the company was in development about three years prior to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the PlanConnect app is now relevant more than ever, according to Reddock.

“With people working from home more, [managers] may not always have access to the information they want, relative to their emergency strategies,” Reddock explained. “They might have access to other building information, but perhaps not emergency, so by having it mobilized, it allows users to access the information that you need from wherever you are.”

Reddock said that there tends to be only one copy of a plan in place. With the help of the PlanConnect app, security managers “can essentially now have every employee have a copy of that plan, and be able to reference it and use it when needed, without having to find one plan,” Reddock says.

While PlanConnect is a mobile-based application, Reddock hopes to see PlanConnect one day evolve to a web-based and desktop solution. For now, Reddock would like to continue to see PlanConnect continue to be a go-to emergency management solution.

“It’s just about making sure that we engage in get more clients involved in using our application, listening and learning to what experiences they have, and making upgrades to it,” Reddock concludes. “But essentially, the big one would be to develop a web-based desktop console that allows you to command and control.”