Tracking your customers’ fire protection equipment accurately is crucial to stay in compliance with vital industry codes and standards. Below we will look at the most important information you should capture when servicing or installing fire protection equipment.
Initial Logging of the Equipment
When installing or servicing equipment for the first time at a new location, you should log all the crucial details of the fire protection system to stay compliant. For installations, this information should be readily available once your designs have been approved. When servicing a new client, work with them to gain a comprehensive knowledge of the system as soon as possible.
Focus on capturing this information:
- Location of equipment (including the building, floor, and room)
- Type of equipment (fire pump, fire sprinkler, riser, etc.)
- Manufacturer, model, and serial numbers
- Capacities (max RPM, pressure in PSI, full load capacity in amps)
- Installation and inspection dates
These are the most important pieces of data you want to log before concluding your business with your customer. Capturing this information now will make your life much easier later. You may also wish to capture other data points, such as due dates for inspection and testing, additional sub-component pressures and ratings, and any special notes. The more information you have, the better equipped you will be when dispatching your team to a given location.
Establish an organizational system that makes sense to you and your coworkers. Ensure thoroughness when logging the details of the fire pumps, sprinkler systems, and other components you find or install on site. If you can establish good records for this information, you'll keep everyone on the same page, making your service faster and your customers happier!
Digitally store your equipment data.
While you can log equipment information by hand (using pen and paper), moving to a fire protection software system (like Smart Service) to handle your equipment will free up massive amounts of time and give everyone a digital repository of information they can easily access on their computer or mobile device.
Therefore, you should put your data into a digital format to keep records clean and make them easy to reference. Use internal rules and develop standards for best practices for entering fire protection equipment information. This will allow you to report on products coming up for service and give you an edge over any of your competitors who do not do this.
Digitally storing your equipment will enable you to provide your customers lists of their on-premise equipment so they can track things as well. In a digital environment like Smart Service, pulling these records into a list is simple and elegant.
Digitize paper forms used for inspections and service.
For more nuanced information, forms need to be filled out and submitted to the party that has jurisdiction, such as fire associations or state departments. Rather than printing paper forms, you should use fire protection software like Smart Service to fill and file them digitally. This allows you to combine your forms with the data you store, helping ensure compliance. By using digital forms, you commit to standardized data capture. Keeping all your drawings, forms, checklists, and work orders all in a single place will provide a “big picture” view of your customer. A bonus is that you do not need to worry about deciphering someone else’s poor handwriting!
Reportable information maximizes efficiency.
The next task in the management of fire protection equipment is reporting. With reportable data, you can forecast upcoming service, audit current information for errors, and create workflows that help drive decisions and maximize profits, all while providing your customers the best service possible.
The best way to do this? Forecast upcoming service with a monthly report that looks at last service dates. This provides insight into the customers eligible to schedule service, as well as the expected revenue from completing these services. (Again, fire protection software like Smart Service can give you a hand with this.)
Auditing reports helps you discover bad data entry, incorrect spelling, and incorrect dates for service. This allows your team to identify issues and resolve them quickly. If your information remains inaccurate, future reports may have wrong or undesirable data.
Create marketing reports to propose promotional discounts or plans to your customers to generate more revenue. Send flyers and other materials based on the data included in your marketing report.
Leverage your fire protection data.
In this article, we have discussed diligently entering information for the equipment our customers have. We’ve talked about building reports that look at forecasting future services/revenue, and building reports that will allow us to market to customers.Â
Organizing, managing, and reporting your data is crucial in today’s business world. With fire protection software like Smart Service, you can do this with ease and dexterity. To better understand the ways tracking equipment in Smart Service can better your business, request a free demonstration today.
