The fire and life safety industry represents the first line of defense against the risks of fire damage. Fire alarms alone likely save thousands of lives each year, not to mention that the hastened response reduces property damage. However, fire and life safety is on the cusp of a major leap in effectiveness and efficiency thanks to digitalization. Digitalization has vast potential in the fire and safety industry, both by empowering service technicians and making safety solutions better.
How Digitalization is Entering Fire and Life Safety
What is Digitalization?
Digitalization is a wide-ranging umbrella term that covers all sorts of different, technology-initiated developments. This trend is all around you, from your use of digital spreadsheets rather than paper documents or use of online video calling. At its core, digitalization is the process of transforming formerly physical, analog processes into digital, software-based ones.
Digitalization can enhance virtually any process and empower field technicians in any industry, but particularly fire and life safety. However, that’s not the only benefit of digitalization in the fire and safety industry; the rich capability of smart, automated processes is also essential.
The Relevance of IoT in Fire, Life Safety
One particularly powerful digitalization trend is the rise of the Internet of Things, IoT. This refers to the network of smart devices that are increasingly inhabiting our homes, workplaces, and other buildings. Phones, televisions, cameras, and more may contain complex sensors and draw all sorts of valuable data. The rise of the IoT-equipped smart home has huge ramifications in empowering devices to detect and deal with fire risks on their own.
Technologies to Watch in Fire and Life Safety
Intelligent Hypoxic Air Systems
Hypoxic air systems can reduce oxygen levels to the point that they will smother any fire in an area. Currently, hypoxic air systems occupy an awkward regulatory space as oxygen-reduction does not fit into a legally recognized framework for fire safety. Likewise, they do pose a danger in areas where people don’t wear suitable PPE.
While this limits the applicability of hypoxic air to uninhabited areas or areas where people have the needed PPE, it’s an incredibly powerful fire prevention resource. In a smart facility with IoT equipment feeding information on smoke, heat, and fire to the other devices, a hypoxic air system can automatically kill fire risks.
Video Image Smoke Detection Systems
Modern algorithms and machine learning have created exciting new possibilities in fire and life safety. Video image smoke detection systems employ cameras that capture visual data and computers that have learned how to identify smoke and other signs of fire in visual data. The end result is a powerful, proactive fire-detection resource that can alert human operators and trigger automated fire-suppression systems.
FieldConnect Digitalization Solutions
With time, digitalization will introduce even more exciting technologies that will make us safer and more efficient than ever before. However, it’s already possible for you to leverage digitalization in your operations and gain a competitive advantage. FieldConnect understands that this form of modernization is already critical to the fire and life safety industry, and has taken measures to help businesses within this industry incorporate recent advances.
Enhance Customer Connectivity
It’s highly important to provide customers with a responsive, transparent process. You should be able to answer their questions about timetables, progress, and the work that your technicians are performing. However, it’s challenging to offer this sort of service with traditional business models; compiling all of this information takes time.
However, digitalization neatly solves the problem with FieldDirect. This program provides relevant, routine inputs from your technicians and management in a convenient, accessible point of access for customers. Your clients can find virtually anything they’ll need on the spot with this program.
Centralize Technician Management
Digitalization is game-changing for fire and life safety managers. In the same way that FieldDirect provides real-time field data to customers, you can use FieldAccess to track operations as they happen. It gives management simultaneous, total access to every worksite while also offering insight into the location and work activities of each contractor. Hour-by-hour management is more efficient than ever thanks to FieldAccess, and it’s well-complemented by FieldGateway.
FieldGateway uses digitalization and smart design in a more big-picture, logistical-strategic sense than other programs. It places supply invoices, current, and near-future work schedules, and eliminates the need for check-in calls and other disruptive necessities of the analog workplace. With these two programs together, you’ll be able to run your business more efficiently than ever. However, digitalization also has benefits for your technicians in the field that will improve productivity and boost customer satisfaction.
Operate Dynamic, Responsive Field Teams
In the eyes of the customer, the most important thing is that a knowledgeable professional does their job correctly. If anything is the second-most important feature, then that is responsiveness and transparency. No one wants to talk to your technicians about a service they need and take hours or longer waiting for a quote or some necessary piece of equipment. In both cases, FieldConnect can streamline your operations with FieldQuotes and FieldDispatch.
FieldQuotes correlates all sorts of pricing information from your inventory to services and calculates quotes on the spot. Likewise, FieldDispatch enables technicians to immediately identify and request the tools they need to get a job done. With this combination, your technicians will be able to take the initiative and give customers the information and services they need in a matter of minutes rather than hours, or hours rather than days.
Get in Touch with the FieldConnect Team
Companies that make use of the advances of digitalization will be able to operate more quickly and efficiently than competitors. If you want to reap the benefits of digitizing your organization, then your next step is to contact FieldConnect. Our representatives will happily answer your questions about the applicability of our solutions, pricing, and more.
Empower your fire and life safety technicians; schedule a consultation with us and incorporate FieldConnect into your operations.