BSS Archangel™
A Critical Business Resiliency Component that Protects Your Physical Structures and their Operations
The BSS Archangel operations and emergency response system represents a first-of-its-kind, computer-based program created to provide building staff members — engineers, security personnel, and administrative and maintenance employees — with detailed information on essential property systems to ensure comprehensive, consistent training, enhance knowledge and enable better preparedness and coordination in the event of a crisis. For first responders, a well-coordinated response to an emergency accelerates reaction time in a safer manner, resulting in saved lives, reduced property damage, and minimized disruptions to occupants.
BSS Archangel features digitized building-specific content and integrates the latest security and access-control technologies, such as government-level encryption, smart cards, and biometrics. The program includes critical building elements such as mechanical, safety, electrical and water systems, emergency stairwell and exit locations, utility shut-offs, storage of hazardous materials, and tactical data that relate to strategic command posts and safe refuge locations.
BSS Archangel integrates a proprietary approach to ensuring continuous updating of critical system detail, such as upgrades, replacements, and warranty expirations. This useful information greatly enhances instruction among personnel at buildings, where there are often high support-staff turnover rates and information gaps. It further enables staff to receive vital training through an engaging, graphically appealing format. The program’s Learning Management System (LMS), including multiple-choice quizzes, enables management to monitor progress and compliance. The LMS records, tracks, and measures knowledge among the “community of users.”
In view of heightened concerns for homeland security and safety, the value that BSS Archangel delivers to emergency response personnel is even more profound. It enables first-responder teams to train and have available to them vital pre-fire planning building information from the convenience of the station house — providing better preparation before an emergency ever takes place. Further, in the inevitability of a crisis, BSS Archangel enables response teams to access information and coordinate plans en route (via onboard computers and handheld PDAs), gaining familiarity with floor plans, evacuation routes, and other building details that save time and improve coordination.
In early demonstrations, the program consistently received high marks from major metropolitan fire departments, which believe its development to be timely. Some cities, for example, rely on out-of-date and unwieldy paper-based building information. Others may have digital information; but it is poorly cataloged, unorganized, and consequently of marginal use. The business model of BSS Archangel is unique and conceived to assist cash-strapped municipalities in deploying this next-generation technology at no cost to city budgets. Instead, landlords, for just a few cents per square foot, will make BSS Archangel available to their local emergency service departments.