Twelve of England's 47 fire services are trialling a
mobile fire safety system that uses handheld devices and tablet PCs
to conduct safety audits. They are expected to go fully live with
the system within the next six months.
The system is designed to help fire services meet government
targets for auditing and testing fire safety equipment used by
private and public organisations, as part of a strategy to make the
fire services more proactive in dealing with safety incidents.
Using the system, fire safety officers can download scheduled
jobs such as home fire safety checks or fire safety audits to an
electronic device, and complete them offline.
Officers can also send information from their handheld devices
via GPRS or 3G networks to a central fire safety database.
The client application from software supplier Innogistic
Software - Community Fire Risk Management Information System
(CFRMIS) Mobile - integrates with a back-end
application, also from Innogistic.
This system records each job, the action carried out, and
details about individual premises, such as the location of smoke
alarms. It uses this information to create audit reports for
compliance purposes.
The system can also determine the risk level of individual
premises and when they need to be re-inspected.
The 12 fire and rescue services that have placed orders for
CFRMIS Mobile are Cheshire, Durham & Darlington, Greater
Manchester, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Leicestershire,
Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Tyne
& Wear, and Wiltshire.
Daniel Ormsby, marketing and business development director at
Innogistic Software, said the company has provided the fire
services with the CFRMIS back-end application for varying lengths
of time.
He said that the mobile logging system would make the services
more efficient by making them far less reliant on paper-based
manual processes.
"In the past, most of the fire services have done this using
paper forms, which they handed to an administrator, but this was
inefficient and open to error," said Ormsby.
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