Founded in 1827, the Brockton Fire Department is one of the largest in the state of Massachusetts. Today, the Class 1 department has close to 200 personnel assigned across six stations and responds to over 26,000 incidents a year. Managing their regular schedule, while filling multiple overtime shifts each day, can be challenging. Department policies and union rules add another level of complexity.

“The system we were using to track our overtime before was basically confined to one desktop and our scheduling matrix was still done by hand” says Deputy Chief Scott Albanese. “We had multiple issues where if that computer went down, we had no overtime list.” It also fell into the shift commander’s hands to do all the reconciling of overtime with payroll records, taking him hours to complete. 

As it happens with many fire departments, the shift commander in charge typically has to manually make phone calls and wait for responses. This process sometimes takes an entire day or night to complete while waiting for firefighters to decline or accept shifts.

“But we’re working with real-time stuff now,” explains Deputy Chief Scott Albanese. “With Firehouse 24/7 the guys can plan. And there’s full transparency so there are no surprises.”