Suburban Fire Departments
Managing a fire department involves coordinating a lot of moving parts. Equipment needs to be accounted for, certifications need to stay up to date, vehicles need maintenance, and dispatch needs accurate and updated information to send the proper units where they are needed.
For many departments, these tasks are spread across multiple different systems, or even handled manually. You might be tracking equipment on spreadsheets, with certifications on paper or in separate databases, and vehicle maintenance in a completely different platform to begin with. When none of your information is connected, it creates extra work for you and provides opportunity for errors that cannot be afforded.
AngelTrack consolidates these functions into one platform. Everything from asset tracking and employee certifications to dispatch management and real-time vehicle location is in the same system.
This guide walks through common operational challenges fire departments face and shows how AngelTrack addresses them. If you're evaluating software options or looking to streamline your department's operations, this will give you a clear picture of what's possible.
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The Problem with Manual Equipment Tracking
When you're managing hundreds of pieces of equipment, such as hoses, SCBA units, medical supplies, tools; keeping track of it all manually is difficult, confusing, and often leads to failure and error. Spreadsheets can become outdated, paper logs don't travel with your gear, or maybe somebody borrows equipment for training and forgets to log that.
But the main issue isn't just the time lost searching for these missing items: it's showing up to a scene and realizing a critical piece of equipment isn't where it should be, or discovering during an inspection that you can't account for all of your expensive assets, and then there is the hours spent reconciling inventory when you could be doing something more useful.
AngelTrack gives you a centralized system where every piece of equipment is logged, tracked, and accounted for in real time. You know what you have, where it is, and what condition it's in, right when you need to. No more guessing, and no more last-minute scrambles.
Learn More: Fire Inventory Software | Fire Department Asset Tracking
Keeping Certifications Up To Date Without the Hassle
Fire departments run on certifications, EMT licenses, driver certifications, hazmat training, CPR renewals. Every member of your team has several different credentials that expire all at different times. In a suburban department even with a smaller crew, that's dozens of certifications to track and renew throughout the year.
Most departments handle this with spreadsheets, wall calendars, or someone's personal tracking system. It works, until someone's certification lapses without anyone noticing. Now you're without that member on a shift, rushing to try and adjust assignments, or maybe worse, and facing compliance problems during an audit.
AngelTrack automates your certification tracking. The system monitors expiration dates and sends alerts before credentials can expire. You can see at a glance which team members have compliant certifications, who needs renewal soon, and where gaps might affect your staffing. It takes this task off of whoever has been tracking this manually, and it helps you ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Learn More: Fire Certificate Tracking
When Vehicle Maintenance Falls Behind
Your fleet is the cornerstone of your responsive capabilities. If and when a truck breaks down or gets pulled out of service unexpectedly, it doesn't just cause inconvenience, but it affects your ability to respond efficiently.
The main problem is that maintenance schedules are easy to lose track of when they are managed separately from everything else. Oil changes can get delayed, inspections are missed, and what start as small issues turn into bigger problems because no one was able to catch them on time. You end up with vehicles out of commission longer than necessary or expensive repairs that could have been prevented.
AngelTrack keeps track of all vehicle maintenance schedules, as well as the rest of your operations. Our system logs service history, reminds you when maintenance is due, and helps you stay ahead of necessary inspections, so you can plan around scheduled maintenance instead of scrambling when something breaks down at the worst possible time.
Learn More: Fire Fleet Management
The Cost of Outdated Fire Preplans
Fire preplans are meant to make your job easier, giving your crews critical information about buildings, hazards, and access points before they arrive at a scene. But if those preplans are outdated or difficult to access when you need them, they're not actually helping anyone.
Many departments are working with preplans stored in binders at the station, or buried in outdated software that's clunky to navigate. By the time someone pulls up the information, your crew is already on scene figuring things out themselves. Or maybe worse, the preplan hasn't been updated in years and the building layout or occupancy has changed completely since it was created.
AngelTrack keeps fire preplans accessible and current. Crews can pull up building information instantly from their devices, and updates can be made as buildings change or new structures are added to your district. When your team rolls up to a commercial fire, they have the information they need right away, not five minutes later after digging through files.
Learn More: Fire Department Preplans
Dispatch Delays and AngelTrack’s CAD System
When your department gets a call, your dispatcher needs to know exactly what is happening, where it is, and which units and personnel are available to respond. If any of that information is missing, inaccurate, or hard to find, your response time will suffer before your crew even leaves the station.
Many departments are working with dispatch software that doesn't integrate with the rest of their system. Call details might be entered manually, unit availability isn't updated in real time, or the dispatcher has to check multiple resources just to figure out which crew to send. Each one of these things adds time to your response that you can never get back.Â
AngelTrack's CAD (Computer-Aided Dispatch) system streamlines this entire process by keeping everything connected. All incoming call information, unit availability, and crew status are kept in one unified place. Your dispatcher can see which units are ready, where they are, and then send the closest available crew without having to piece together information from different systems. Our CAD system handles call intake, unit assignment, and real-time status updates all within the same platform, and is directly integrated with the rest of our system. It helps you cut delays and gets your people to the scene as fast as possible.Â
Learn More: Fire Cad Software
Not Knowing Where Your Units Actually Are And How Our AVL Helps
Your dispatcher assigns a unit to a call based on where they think that unit is. But without real-time tracking, that's often really just an educated guess. A crew might be returning from a hospital transport, stopped at a different station, or maybe dealing with an issue that hasn't been radioed in yet. Sometimes the predicted crew isn’t actually the most accessible for a situation.
Most departments rely on their crews giving a status update over the radio or checking in at certain points. This typically works to an extent, but it doesn't allow you to see exactly where your fleet actually is at any given moment.
AngelTrack's Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) system shows you where every one of your vehicles is in real time on a map. Your dispatcher can see actual positions and send the unit that's accurately the closest, not just the one they have to assume is nearby. Our system is a straightforward and easy way to improve response times without adding complexity to your operations.
Learn More: Automated Vehicle Location
Getting Your Team on Board
New software will only work if your team actually uses it. If the system is complicated or requires a long learning process, your firefighters will likely make mistakes, work around the platform, or just avoid using it in general; simply because they don’t understand it.Â
Not everyone in your crew is going to be comfortable with new technology. You likely have veterans who have been doing things a certain way for years, and younger members who might pick it up faster but still need training. If the platform isn't intuitive and simple, you will end up spending more time troubleshooting and retraining than you will actually end up benefitting from it.
AngelTrack was built with that in mind. Our interface is straightforward, with the most common tasks easy to find, and the system doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge to operate. Your team can get up to speed on it quickly without feeling overwhelmed, which means less resistance to the change and faster adaption in general, so you can see results sooner instead of spending months trying to get people comfortable with the new system.
Learn More: AngelTrack's Fire Department Software