In many ways, the world seems to have become more and more predictable. Technology and modern conveniences give the illusion of stability. But it is just that: an illusion. The world today is more volatile than ever. Witness bombs falling in a modern city like Kyiv, the latest mass shooting in a supermarket or school, or unexpected weather creating news flashes showing fires, tornadoes, or floods rushing through crowded subdivisions. The worst part of this unpredictability? The lack of effective ways to deal with inevitable turmoil in our world. Until now.
Enter Counterspherics. Recognizing the massive gap in effective emergency planning and response, the Counterspherics team developed MERLENN® to shine light into the shadowed corners of unpredictability by planning for and streamlining the human response to save lives and property when bad things happen.
Organizations can’t possibly automate every response to a disaster. But they can plan, respond, and recover quickly by reducing the complexity of what it takes to survive a catastrophic occurrence. The goal is to minimize the impact on their people, operations, and geographical locations, keeping the doors open for their organization to continue functioning effectively. Human reactions to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, riots, workplace violence, and other natural or man-made threats vary from person to person or region to region. By engineering MERLENN®, Counterspherics has created an answer to the question: “How can we use technology to create an effective, consistent human response to any crisis?”
MERLENN® ensures that people respond to a threat or potential threat in a standard way, using unified communications, best practices, workflows, and checklists, to keep everyone on the same page. It’s a system allowing users to organize and communicate before, during, and after emergencies. The benefit? Using MERLENN® to send near and real-time updates to employees, students, or first responders allows people to receive and respond to situational information in real-time. Time and time again, the inability to act is due to a lack of information during a crisis, leading to indecisiveness, hesitation, confusion, and, therefore, a delayed or inconsistent response. This will lead to the compounding of tragic results in an already awful situation. Mitigation requires a calm and measured reaction. Humans are not robots. They must adapt to changing situations, and “change” is the one constant which is always present in an emergency. MERLENN® ensures its human operators can respond to hazards and threats in a standard way that allows them to adapt to any changes that suddenly pop up. Here’s how.
MERLENN™: Before a Crisis/Incident (“Prepare”)
Preparation means implementing infrastructure and processes. MERLENN™ is that infrastructure.
MERLENN is short for “Multiple Emergency Response from Linked Emergency Notification Networks.” It’s a single portable system that combines the power of 20 different systems into a user-friendly design to monitor, protect, alert, and help businesses, offices, groups, and organizations respond during an incident. The software caters to people in healthcare, government, education, community, church, corporate, retail, and small business.
MERLENN®’s Cloud components ensure coordination and distribution of situational intelligence to people wherever they are. In situations where information accuracy and speed are of the essence, a smartphone is all that is needed to receive MERLENN® messages.
MERLENN® also provides business continuity planning and integration with its online training portal, helping groups, organizations, offices, and teams, prepare for the worst before the worst occurs.
MERLENN®: During a Crisis/Incident (“React and Manage”)
There are three ways MERLENN™ facilitates real-time or near real-time communication during day-to-day operations and in critical situations. The first is operational support functions built into the system and connections between different MERLENN® systems within the same organization via the Cloud.
The second is mass texting. MERLENN® offers ‘safety and wellness checking’ through a point-and-click interface and pre-composed messages to speed the sending of information to everyone who has opted to receive the system’s messages. Simply put, MERLENN® makes it easier for a MERLENN® Operator (person running the system) to send mass alerts, warnings, instructions, and safety checks day-to-day or in the event of an active shooting, civil unrest, or other local, national, or global events. “Your people” may be students and faculty on or off a school’s campus, office workers, hospital and clinic staff, city personnel, church congregations, first responders, and people traveling abroad.
In addition, MERLENN® also receives texts for help or on-the-scene information sharing. For example, if a MERLENN® recipient’s reply to a system text asking if they are “Safe/OK” is a “Yes,” you can keep sending the occasional text to ensure their continued safety. However, if their response is “No,” it’s conveyed to the company’s Contingency Response, which would set a coordinated 911-type response in motion. If there’s no response, that will set additional communication and escalation procedures in motion.
MERLENN®’s mass alerts and warnings work the same way as the mass wellness checks.
The goal is straightforward: to save lives and protect your assets.
MERLENN™: After a Crisis/Incident (“Follow-through”)
MERLENN™ reduces downtime for the organization through recovery management, which may include casualties, associated costs, loss of operational capability, insurability, structural damage, impact size, and more.
One could assume that MERLENN® allows its operators the ability to:
- Plan: Establish Emergency Operations Plan distribution, procedures, protocols, etc.
- Train: Teach through drills and simulations the response and actions to a threat before it occurs.
- Act: Provide relevant situational information to recipients of MERLENN’s® messages to determine the appropriate lifesaving action(s) to take.
- Recover: To pick up the pieces and learn from the incident, bringing it all full circle.
Counterspherics, the company behind MERLENN®, has 22 years of experience providing crisis response infrastructure and boasts a 100% customer satisfaction rate. To view illustrated examples of the software in action, follow Counterspherics on YouTube.
