St. Louis turns to RealView’s CommandScope pre-plan technology

Enabling the information about buildings and other facilities to be updated easily is a key feature of CommandScope, Howorka said.

“Especially when you’re dealing with a big city like St. Louis, there are so many changes that are occurring on a daily basis, there’s no physical way to keep that information current when it’s on paper—it’s absolutely impossible,” he said. “By utilizing our CommandScope technology, if a captain enters data on one building, it is pushed out to every other user of the program in near real time. So, there is no pasting, no copying, no faxing, no e-mailing; it’s just instantly pushed out to everybody on the system.”

In addition to being updated with information collected during regular fire inspections or building inspections, CommandScope also provides a way for building owners to electronically submit pertinent changes to their fire departments that can be added quickly and easily, he said.

This is a significant issue for building owners, who told RealView staff members—many of which have real-estate backgrounds—of frustrations associated with getting updated information into fire department pre-plans before CommandScope, Howorka said.

“A little over a year ago, one of our former corporate customers came to us and said, ‘That program that you guys are providing to the first responders, we’d like it to help reduce our risk. We are constantly paper information and disks over to the city for distribution to the fire department, but we know it never makes it to the street level,’” Howorka said.

“As soon as that came out, we realized, ‘They are the stakeholders in the building, and they’re the ones that really have the data anyway. So, if we can bring the building owners and manager and emergency first responders together with the same data platform, everybody wins.”