SMARTDRAW IN FACILITIES MANAGEMENT:

Campbell County Fire Department

Eric Acton is a nine-year veteran of the Campbell County Fire Department in Gillette, Wyoming located in the northeastern part of the state. He plays the role of both Fire Investigator and IT Director, which means half his time is spent on "suppression" assignments (putting out fires, conducting fire investigations, answering hazardous materials calls) and the other half on keeping the computers and networks running efficiently.

"If there's a fire, I'm the one who goes out to investigate, write reports for submissions to insurance companies and provide the normal documentation associated with such an event," said Eric.

Like a lot of other fire departments, Campbell County recently needed to devise a pre-plan program where they go out to inspect businesses (motels, restaurants, etc.) and document certain physical and geographical aspects. For instance, every business in the county needed to be diagrammed to determine the building layouts, floor layouts and where the flammables, hazards and access points were located. Also needed were the hours of operations, number of employees at a given time, and so on. Like many fire departments before them, Campbell County selected SmartDraw to handle the assignment

"We really like SmartDraw," said Eric. Initially it was kind of overwhelming —in a good way—because there are so many things to use it for. For instance, if we need to create a floor plan, there is a SmartTemplate for that. If we need to create a flowchart for our IT department, there is another SmartTemplate for that purpose. Our administrative office also uses SmartDraw to make calendars and org charts, which go into presentations for the fire board and ultimately help fund our department."

But SmartDraw's functionality doesn't end there. As part of the pre-plan program, CCFD needed to put mobile laptop computers in several vehicles to dispatch the information they collected.

"We put the system together in a presentation for the various first line response staffing units, and I used SmartDraw to define how that system was going to coordinate and go together," said Eric. "We were very pleased how everything turned out."

Prior to using SmartDraw, Eric had no graphic design background of any kind. "The program was very easy to pick up, but what impressed me most was the range of templates that are offered, and the abundance of different projects you can address with it."

Prior to Eric's involvement with SmartDraw, some of the investigators were using Microsoft Visio^®, and Eric himself was using Microsoft Paint^®, but found the program awkward and difficult to learn. From the day his shift captain introduced Eric to SmartDraw, he hasn't looked back.

"I used Paint^® to do straight lines and text which was kind of cumbersome. SmartDraw is the polar opposite, because its floor plan has furniture and appliances and everything else you can imagine ready to plug right into where you need them.

Thanks to my strong advocacy of the program, the entire Campbell County fire department is now using SmartDraw. We currently have five active users, and I anticipate all ten licenses being utilized before long."