GB3 Limited is a Technology Solutions company based in Preston delivering Strategy, Systems and Support. Starting life 5 years ago with only 7 employees, GB3 Limited has grown rapidly to a team of over 40 staff, expanding in to Cyber Security and Software Development. The GB3 Development team specialise in turning complex business requirements in to clean and easy-to-use systems, focusing on resilience and response capabilities.

One source of truth for Resilience

GB3 Limited began working with ResilienceDirect in 2016 when they were approached by London Fire Brigade to build an information sharing platform for the London Resilience Forum, London Prepared. With over 25 different agencies across London that make up London Prepared, it is vital that they can easily provide situation updates and react and plan quickly when an incident arises. GB3 took the original specification to build a Situational Awareness system and the success of this quickly grew in to a richer solution, which has been in use since January 2017. The London Situational Awareness Tool is built on the Aeryal platform, offering full Incident Management capability including METHANE reporting for major incidents, RAG situational response from partners and instant auto-collation of multiple sitreps in to a single Common Operating Picture. All the partners within the LRF contribute to the system’s data picture. The platform has its own rich Document Storage capability and also features general situational reports, event planning, duty officer and on-call management and most recently, social media and web feed integration. The Aeryal platform is easily configurable by administrative users, meaning that the platform can be rolled out to any type of organisation, not just a Resilience Forum, that needs to communicate situational awareness between teams on the ground to those in control and command.

Linking in with Business Continuity

Following the success of the LSAT system, London Fire Brigade returned to GB3 to build a new capability that could be used to focus on business continuity and continuous awareness of service provision capabilities. We were tasked to build a platform that would aid any group or organisation to work collaboratively during a crisis, sharing resources and providing impact reports on both a local and wider scale. GB3 Development built the Radyus platform, rolling out to London Local Authorities to be used for Safer City 2018 and then configured the system to roll out to London Fire Brigade itself.

Taking the concepts developed for LSAT Incident Management, we adapted these to build a system that enables users to have a visual of the overall status of service provision and easily identify how up-to-date information is.Existing processes in this area often involve a lengthy manual process to collate information together; meaning it’s often out-of-date by the time a report is produced. Radyus’ reporting engine collates situation reports in to a single comprehensive incident report within seconds, immediately available to download as a PDF. To encourage collaboration and improve auditing, a sitrep can be completed by multiple users on a field-by-field basis, rather than a single user completing a whole form, recording the date and time each field was updated and by who. This means lower overheads for an emergency planning team as service providers can update on their own service and the Emergency Planning team can see immediately how up-to-date that update is.

Missing Person reporting as quick as tweeting

GB3 Limited have also worked on a second project with ResilienceDirect and the National Casualty Bureau Working Group to develop a platform to harness the public’s interaction and communication around an incident or crisis and more easily track missing persons. In a world of mobile phones and social media, the public are often a vital source of information during an incident and communicate through tweets, pictures and videos within minutes of an incident occurring. However, to set up a Casualty Bureau for an incident can take up to 4 hours, meaning that vital information could be missed.

The ERIC (Emergency Response In Crisis) platform is a web application that enables a force to set up an incident area online so that the public can easily and securely report missing persons and provide informative updates in less than 5 minutes. 

Once registered with ERIC, the public can manage their own missing person reports; updating and even cancelling them if their loved ones are found safe, meaning Casualty Bureau volunteers and those responding on the ground can focus their search on those who are actually missing. The public can also send secure messages to ERIC administrators with any key information about the incident and the system auto-flags messages if the content is considered sensitive or of high-importance. Casualty Bureau volunteers and senior staff can securely log in to the administrative portal within the system to manage the incoming missing person reports and message updates. On closure of an incident, it is taken offline and any remaining missing person reports can be exported as CSV data and imported in to HOLMES for further investigation. 

The future of ERIC is to integrate with Survivor Reception Centres, ambulance services and hospitals to track casualties and support Child Rescue alerts too. 

GB3 Limited understand how vital it is for the Resilience community to have the best capabilities at their fingertips in response to crisis and are dedicated to providing high-quality solutions that can support those who support us. To see a demo of our platforms please email us at demo@gb3.co.uk or contact us on development@gb3.co.uk if you have an enquiry about our systems or are looking for a high-quality provider of bespoke software.