Article Highlights
- The problem: Manual policy management processes
- The solution: Policy management software
- The benefits of fire department software
The problem: Manual policy management processes
Firefighters face potential hazards every day on the job, so it's important that they're fully prepared for whatever comes their way. That not only means having the best equipment, but also effectively managing your fire department SOPs.
Unfortunately, many fire department policies and procedures are a mishmash of old policies collected into a binder or stored on a shared hard drive in the department. Everyone is ideally given a new policy manual when they start on the job, but how many continue to review it? And how can they look up a policy if the binder is back at the station house? A manual policy management process makes it hard to efficiently update and distribute policies and standard operating procedures. Manual processes are laborious and time-consuming, taking away from more important tasks and driving inefficiencies that result in higher costs for paper and printing and staff labor.
These paper-based policy management systems also make it difficult to ensure preparedness and compliance across the entire agency with the latest fire department policies and procedures. There's no easy way to share hard copies of fire department policies and procedures, short of delivering them by hand and then ensuring every firefighter signs a form signifying their receipt. In turn, this can create liability and compliance risks if firefighters are not up-to-date on policies/SOPs, which impacts safety, preparation, and efficiency in emergency situations.
The solution: Policy management software
The headaches that come with manual processes can all be eliminated with policy management software. PowerPolicy by PowerDMS is a comprehensive cloud-based solution that allows your fire department to streamline workflows, automate reviews, and manage and update policies in one central repository.
Streamline policy communication
With PowerPolicy, you can alert staff to activities requiring their attention, including review and approval tasks and document version releases. Set automatic email notifications for specific users, departments, or refined lists – with the ability to specify frequency and urgency – about policy updates and electronic signature tracking to ensure your staff is aware of changes. You can also limit access to ensure that only authorized personnel can see specific documents and give employees proper levels of access to critical information.
Automated review processes
PowerPolicy lets you set review dates for fire department documents to ensure proactive review, updates, and approval on a regular basis as defined by workflows. During the policy review process, approvers receive automatic notifications when it's their turn to review or edit an updated document. Plus, you can track document review dates, comments, and approval status, and departments can also manually log external reviews.
Document tracking and searchability
Version control and auto-archiving features automatically archive old document versions so only the most current is available to staff. PowerPolicy also tracks the full history of changes to documents so you can see what updates were made, when, and by whom.
Finally, this fire department software lets you categorize and tag documents by specific fields, which are indexed for full-text searches and Google searches. And you can bookmark important policies and procedures so you can easily access them every time you need them.
The benefits of fire department software
A digital policy management solution helps your department eliminate all the problems and headaches of a manual process. You can save both time and money by updating policies and SOPs four times faster than paper-based processes that require sending revised policies to different department leaders for approval. Furthermore, organizations that use PowerPolicy save as much as $11,000 in paper and printing costs, on average, with digital document storage.
This software solution also ensures staff accountability and consistency, and reduces liability and compliance risks for your fire department. You can keep firefighters and your community safe knowing your entire department is following up-to-date policies and procedures.
Learn more
If you want to learn how the PowerPolicy fire department software saves money and ensures that you can track and distribute policy updates, visit our website for a free demo.