“With over 40 years of business in this field, our team of experts has what you need to develop and adapt technology to fit the needs of planning, response, and recovery related to a disaster”

Disasters don’t follow a blueprint and any number of variables such as geography, socioeconomics, politics, demographics, weather, culture, and other dynamics that inherently make up a location at the time of a disaster can have huge impacts on how recovery needs to be carried out. While people can prepare, exercise, and plan with these variables in mind, very often that knowledge is siloed in the systems and minds of people that may not even be involved in the response and recovery from that event. In fact, Disaster Recovery’s biggest challenge is that it is very difficult to predict and plan for. The key to success is to provide tools that encourage others to share this information in a way that makes it easy to operationalize those plans at the time of an emergency. That’s where Buffalo Computer Graphics (BCG) stands out from the crowd. An engineering company at heart, BCG offers extremely intuitive and automated web-based tools that help businesses prepare for, respond to, and report on emergencies. “With over 40 years of business in this field, our team of experts has what you need to develop and adapt technology to fit the needs of planning, response, and recovery related to a disaster,” begins Tim Masterson, Executive Director of Products, BCG.

As a pioneer in the industry, BCG provides enterprise-level products to customers in maritime, military, and emergency management. The team builds commercial off-the-shelf and custom solutions that set the standard in their industries. Moreover, all of the engineering is done in house by an experienced and talented team. BCG is an ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified provider.

Enabling Seamless Planning and Response
The company’s DisasterLAN Incident Management System (DLAN) is one of many products offered by BCG in the Incident Management space and is designed to assist emergency managers in the planning, response, and recovery tasks related to an incident. The solution is customizable to the forms, terminology, and workflows of any industry that finds itself needing to track, report on, and display data related to a planned event, just-in-time incident, or project related to daily operations. DLAN customers can choose the tools they need to meet their requirements and can easily integrate data from other systems to assist in overall situational awareness, thanks to its innovative modular design.

In addition, DLAN comes with a robust GIS toolset that ties into all aspects of the software including Incident management, resource tracking, and situation awareness. Users can easily integrate data from a multitude of third-party sources to help them to make decisions related to these important elements of managing an emergency. Additionally, the software offers users the ability to create forms, dashboards, and reports through easy-to-use interfaces that do not require any web programming experience. As a result, regular users can easily adapt to new workflows within the software without having to come to BCG.

Today, DLAN is used by hundreds of organizations that vary in size from private companies, small departments, municipalities, regions, states/provinces, and international deployments. This is because the team understands that the key to succeeding in the incident management space is by building and providing tools that allow users to work in a day-to-day manner.

Unmatched Expertise, On-time Support
What is interesting is that the company’s expertise and support team are second to none in this arena. Where many companies provide support only to high-paying customers, BCG prides in providing excellent service to its entire customer base. Also, with the arrival of FAQs, forums, chatbots, and other forms of automated support, many of its competitors have abandoned in-person support, often leaving it up to the customer to find a solution to a problem. While all of the competitors in this space have some great software tools, it’s this personal element that sets BCG apart from the rest. “We pride ourselves in our ability to solve complex challenges and strive to create tools that simplify workflows while providing best-in-class support services. This expertise and commitment allow us the ability to build new tools and integrate existing tools in meaningful ways that assist our customers,” adds Masterson.

An instance that highlights the company’s value proposition is when BCG has been a part of one of the largest recovery programs ever run in the country through its participation in the disaster recovery that took place within Puerto Rico after hurricanes Irene and Maria. The company’s tools helped disaster recovery staff to track the documentation, photographs, checklists, sign-offs, and workflow for every person that came through the FEMA STEP program within that region. Its software assisted in tracking the registration into the program, home reconstruction efforts, inspector site visits, and other touchpoints that were required to help over a hundred thousand people get back into their homes.

Inception and Innovation
Since its inception, BCG has been a key player in redefining the way businesses manage disasters, A veteran owned US small business, BCG’s team is a group of software, hardware, and systems engineering experts. Today, BCG has three primary business areas - Maritime Simulation Solutions, Incident Management Systems, and Custom Hardware & Software Engineering. BCG also prides itself on building solutions that can be used every single day by emergency managers, duty officers, logistics teams, and other staff. As part of its expansion plan, in addition to growing its footprint in incident management in North America, BCG continues to grow in education, healthcare, event management, and other verticals. “We also have expanded our client base outside of North America into other areas across the globe. We are regularly growing our partnership network as we look for new ways to deliver our, and our partners’ services to these growing markets,” concludes Masterson.