First Arriving Dashboards is an essential tool for fire, EMS, and law enforcement personnel, offering enhanced communication, real-time data, and critical operational insights. To ensure your dashboard remains aligned with the ever-evolving needs of your team, it’s important to regularly update and optimize its content. Previously we shared five ways to refresh your First Arriving Dashboards for maximum effectiveness, and here are five more.
Review Alarms and Notifications: Evaluate your current alarm and notification settings to ensure they align with your department’s evolving needs. Update and fine-tune your notifications to receive timely alerts for critical incidents, resource availability changes, or any other essential updates.
Our dashboard offers default mapping powered by ESRI, with additional options for customers using Mapbox or Here.com. ESRI customers can enjoy expanded features with numerous mapping layer options, including directional and turn-by-turn navigation, hydrant data, and other customer-provided layers. The dashboard also includes a countdown (or up) clock and the ability to feed data from Active911, email (with a custom parser), various CAD feeds, and more. Alerts can remain on screen for a specified duration, and you can add custom tone alert sounds, with a recommendation for ramping up the audio.
Incorporate Analytics and Performance Metrics: Make use of the analytics and performance metrics available in First Arriving Dashboards to identify trends, areas for improvement, and insights into your operations. Use this data to drive data-driven decision-making and optimize your response strategies.
Engage Staff in Dashboard Development: Involve your staff in the process of refreshing and optimizing your dashboards. Seek their input on the information and metrics that are most useful to them and incorporate their suggestions into the dashboard design. This collaboration fosters engagement and ensures the dashboards reflect the needs of all users.
Continuous Training and Education: Provide regular training and education sessions to ensure that your personnel are proficient in utilizing the full capabilities of First Arriving Dashboards. Promote a culture of continuous learning to keep your team updated on any new features or enhancements.
Evaluate and Adapt: Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your refreshed dashboards and gather feedback from users. Pay attention to any areas that need improvement or additional customization. Continuously adapt and refine your dashboards to meet the changing needs of your department and personnel.
Regularly refreshing and optimizing your First Arriving Dashboards is crucial to maintaining their value as a tool that supports your response efforts. By reassessing and updating dashboard layouts, streamlining essential information, refining filters and parameters, integrating new data sources, enhancing mapping capabilities, reviewing alarms and notifications, utilizing analytics, engaging your team, providing ongoing training, and continually adapting to changes, you can maximize the effectiveness of your dashboards. These steps will help you maintain high situational awareness, improve decision-making, and elevate your overall response operations, ultimately benefiting your community.
Need some help implementing these changes? No problem. Submit a support ticket here.
