3 Ways RFID Streamlines Fire Service Management
The role that firefighters play in society is often overlooked because fire emergencies don’t always happen. Nonetheless, they are very important because they help to save lives during an emergency. For firefighters, the availability and maintenance of their equipment are essential so that they can perform their tasks effectively.
In order to keep their equipment in working conditions, implementing a well-structured management strategy is essential. Firefighters have a lot of important equipment inside a firetruck, and trying to manage all of them is a challenge.
As such, when it comes to managing the fire services equipment, it calls for consistent inventory and regular with frequent checks on the condition of every single firefighting paraphernalia. Manually, it takes up much of a manager’s time to perform all of this. With the incorporation of RFID technology, managing a myriad of assets have been made a lot more organized and efficient.
Some of the many capabilities that an RFID tool tracking system can offer are the ability to read hundreds of tags in just seconds, and its ability to hold more data than the standard barcode – the need to devote hours upon hours to checking individual RFID tags and jotting specific data down is no longer required. How exactly does RFID benefit elevates the fire department operations?
Efficiency with time
In the fire department, there is absolutely no room for time wastage since it is impossible to predict emergency situations. But when it does, immediate action is necessary.
However, as manually checking every piece of equipment is going to take up a significant amount of time – this is not an option. Instead, integrating the use of RFID in the management of fire equipment promotes time efficiency; various tests have proven that RFID is able to take into account 12,000 items in a far shorter time, making it at least 25 times faster than the use of barcodes.
More accurate inventory data
Inventory data accuracy is very important in the fire department because the negative implications can be very dire if a single piece of equipment is unaccounted or missing.
Every firetruck has to be equipped with the necessary tools so that the firefighters on board can perform their task efficiently and effectively. RFID definitely make this a possibility. The use of RFID in management strategies has been proven to have an accuracy of 95% to 99%, compared to barcoding with an accuracy of only 65%.
Items can be located much easier
Given that there are hundreds of fire equipment to keep track, misplacing one or two of them is likely to be common. This is not ideal because trying to look for these items will take time.
But if RFID is integrated, locating misplaced items is made simpler since RFID asset tracking helps the user to locate the missing item, provided it is within the reader’s range.
When it comes to the fire department, efficiency is critical because emergency situations call for immediate response. To help achieve this, integrating RFID into the management strategy helps to optimise the use of time, promote accuracy of the equipment inventory, and locate misplaced equipment within a shorter time.
