A massive spreadsheet created from 50 individual calendars went up in smoke at this agency after implementing FIRE Manager for online employee scheduling and workforce management.
Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN - In this day and age one would think the days of pen and paper employee scheduling would be a thing of the past. However, due to tight budgets many public safety agencies are still struggling with paper calendars and/or spreadsheets and spending countless hours scheduling staff and additional hours on workforce management data.
Aladtec’s online employee scheduling and workforce management system, FIRE Manager, allows agencies to pay an affordable monthly subscription fee which easily fits most public agency budgets while greatly reducing the amount of time it takes to keep a schedule full and deal with other employee data. Also, with an online system, there is no computer server or hardware costs since the schedule and data is “in the cloud”.
“Our Fire Chief signed up for FIRE Manager’s free trial and then he turned it over to me to explore the program,” says John Bergeron, Deputy Chief of Operations, Harlem-Roscoe Fire Department, Roscoe, Illinois. “I would get 45-50 calendars with personnel’s availability and I’d put them all into a spreadsheet. On top of that, I’d have to manually look at every date/time, MS status, Engineer, etc. to place personnel in the correct position. It was very time consuming. Since using FIRE Manager my scheduling time has been cut in half. The system is also great because now I can see who’s available every day, all the positions, their scheduled hours, and I can set parameters on certain hours they can work.”
Deputy Chief Bergeron indicates his personnel like Aladtec’s FIRE Manager because all trades/giveaways can be done online and when it is approved the member gets an immediate notification by text and or email. In the past it would need to be done through an exchange of phone calls or emails. With the FIRE Manager mobile web app members can access their schedule anytime from anyplace making trades/giveaways easy to make and easy to approve.
“The other thing I really like about FIRE Manager is when I have a message I need members to read, I can put it in the system and make members acknowledge they read the message before they can go further into the system,” Bergeron adds.
The Harlem-Roscoe Fire Department has 80 members covering roughly 85 square miles with approximately 25,000 residents. Located at the Wisconsin and Illinois border, Harlem-Roscoe Fire Protection District was incorporated on April 4, 1940. This combination fire department has over 2,000 emergency calls annually.
Aladtec, Inc. is a proud provider of web-based software solutions for online employee scheduling and workforce management applications. The company’s flagship products, EMS Manager and FIRE Manager, are leaders in the public safety sector. Together with their newest product, Zanager, they serve nearly 900 EMS agencies, fire departments, police departments and other businesses. Over 50,000 employees use Aladtec’s online employee scheduling and workforce management products. Aladtec is headquartered just outside the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area in Hudson, Wisconsin. For more information, visit www.aladtec.com.