RedZone works with insurance companies, public utilities, and private fire companies to protect their clients’ assets from wildfires and other natural hazards.
Protecting homes and infrastructure from wildfire with real-time data.
Through a sophisticated system of data collection, enrichment, and analysis, RedZone monitors developing wildfires and deploys fire engines to mitigate the threat to its clients’ assets.
After firefighters arrive on-site and respond to the threat, they document everything. Examples include descriptions of all actions taken, photographs of damage-prevention measures, and assessment of any damage found. This documentation is easily shared with insurance companies and property owners.
Initially, RedZone developed an in-house solution for firefighter documentation. However, that solution did not scale to an exceptionally large user demand.
A firefighter covers the vents of a home to prevent embers from getting in.
In the summer of 2018, RedZone started a pilot program in which the firefighters used Fulcrum to both organize the response and document their activities in the field.
“It costs more money to pay our busy developers to figure out what’s going on hour to hour than to pay for all the Fulcrum accounts we need,” said Adam Prell, Operations Manager for RedZone.
The program was a success and RedZone moved the entirety of its response program to the Fulcrum platform, allowing the company to retire the in-house app.
RedZone’s developers built an integration that leverages the Fulcrum API to send detailed incident and location information to the app and assign resources to be deployed. When the firefighters get to the home or structure, they document their activity in Fulcrum. Once a record is updated in the platform, the information is displayed on RedZone’s dashboard.
Using Fulcrum’s required fields, visibility logic and data events, RedZone has created customized apps that save the firefighters time out in the field.
For example, if a firefighter sprays foam retardant on a structure, then Fulcrum prompts them to take a picture of the area as a record that assists them in follow-up visits.
Later, if the firefighters return to the home and it is not threatened, “they will not get questions about what they did to mitigate the threat,” Adam said. “It saves time to be able to make those questions conditional.”
Once the visit is over and the Fulcrum form has been filled out, the status of that record changes to “completed” and syncs to the cloud. “Our customers can see updated field work in the RedZone dashboard pretty much instantaneously with information about what went on there,” Adam said.
Fulcrum’s reliability and offline mapping capability are vital to RedZone’s operations.
“Fires do not always happen where there is great data service, so that is really important,” Adam said. But the main benefit is that all interested parties have the information they need available quickly.
“Time saving in the middle of an emergency situation is huge,” said Adam. “In terms of speed and reliability and being able to work offline, Fulcrum has everything that helps us do our job more efficiently.”
While it is hard to put a monetary measure on it, Adam said the cost-benefit of paying for Fulcrum licenses and maintaining the custom integration has been really “refreshing” compared to the headache it became to maintain their previous mobile app.
“In time savings alone, it pays for itself,” he said.
