The 2019 SAFEcommand User Forum took place in Newcastle on the 12th and 13th November and it was one of the busiest events we’ve had to-date. Not only did we have many more attendees than in previous years, we also had a back-to-back agenda crammed with a variety of different presentations and workshops. Below are some of the key takeaways from the event.

Incident Command

Over the last 12 months we have been working closely with Avon FRS and Thames Valley to enhance our Incident Command offering.

Members from Avon FRS were at the event hosting their own demonstration kit, showing our latest IC version and presented details on how the collaboration has worked over the last year. This included the inception of their project through to the open day that was hosted in Avon in mid-2019. Members of the SAFEcommand Development Team spent 3 days on site with four fire services looking at their specific requirements for the system.

Our Incident Command (IC) product now includes a highly adaptable forms module that can be used to present custom forms such as ARAs to users, in an easy-to-use format. We now have a fully implemented timeline and decision log that can easily be shared to other ScResponse clients on an incident. We’re working closely with Fire and Rescue Services to help develop these functions, who ultimately be the users of the software.

On Day 2, the IC Roadmap workshop gave you the opportunity to provide feedback and discuss the future direction of the product’s development.

Datasharing

Last year, attendees at the Mobile Data Roadmap session indicated that the top priority for SAFEcommand was to deliver an easier way to share data across organisations. This year we made great strides to providing a solution to enable emergency services to do just that. Our new cloud based solution, ScDiscovery, demonstrated the display of live data from two separate gateway deployments in a single online map based system.

Now that it is possible to stream ScGateway data into the cloud and allow you to control who has access to it, we asked attendees where they want us to take this product next?

Attendees indicated that the next step would be to share that data back out again to mobile data devices, so that end users can see the location of resources from neighbouring services while on an incident. The desire for similar functionality for POI data such as Hydrants and risks was also discussed.

We are setting up a working group to refine requirements for this and to take ScDiscovery forward. If you would like to be involved in this please contact John Freeman at john.j.freeman@airbus.com .

ScCapture

This year we have spent a lot of time looking to implement core changes to ScCapture that were requested at the 2018 event. At the User Forum, Paul Trewhitt - Head of Customer Services, acknowledged that we had not communicated the progress with this work as well as we should have throughout the year; coupled with several delays due the complexity of the changes meant that a lot of users were left unhappy with perceived lack of progress with ScCapture this year.

Through the various roadmap workshops we were able to demonstrate the work is now complete; we listened to users concerns and also re-iterated our commitment to making this product function as per user requirements. The key point we took away from the event was that the main changes requested are now implemented and users now need to start utilising it to provide feedback on what we progress with next.

We now have that new version and have created an upgrade schedule (for more information, click here), which we have begun to communicate with our Water Management users. This includes setting up a working group to more actively be involved in development of the product.

Finally

This is just a snapshot of what was discussed at the event and there were many great topics presented and discussed too.

• Opses and West Sussex showed what they have been working on with integration to the Airwave radio from officer car OEM dashboard screens.
• What3Words showed us some of the work they have been doing with Emergency Services including a prototype of ScResponse allowing What3Words searches.
• Andy Motteram from the Home Office came along to discuss the launch of ESN Connect
• Chris Rainford from Lancashire Fire and Rescue Services talking about the use of Drones in Emergency Services.

These were all excellent topics to get people thinking for the roadmap sessions the following day.

Thanks to all who attended and helped make this one of our best events yet. We look forward to seeing you again in 2020.

NOTE: Some of the presentations from the event are now available to download in the ScPortal.

Incident Command working group contact: chris.lumb@airbus.com.

Mobile Data and ScDiscovery working group contact: john.j.freeman@airbus.com.

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