Background

Carmel Fire Department protects a fast-growing Indiana community with a busy operational tempo and a clear expectation: crews should arrive informed, coordinated, and ready to act.

Challenge

Before First Due, critical pre-plan information wasn’t always accessible at the exact moment it mattered. On the administrative side, scheduling tools were serviceable—but cumbersome—requiring hours of daily effort and offering limited vendor support when issues arose. And on complex incidents, documenting command decisions and timelines could quickly devolve into handwritten notes that were difficult to reconstruct during after-action reviews.

Solution

Carmel expanded its use of First Due as an operational backbone:

Pre-Incident Planning + Inspections/Investigations to put building intelligence on every unit’s device. Scheduling & Personnel to reduce daily staffing workload and create a smoother experience for crews. Incident Command + Incident Documentation to improve accountability and produce clean, timestamped records for AARs.

Results

For Carmel, the biggest shift is simple: information is no longer “somewhere else”—it’s in the hands of every responder on every run.

Crews use First Due every day to find entry points, hydrants, Knox Box locations, and contacts while en route. During a major high school gas explosion, pre-plan details helped command quickly locate hookups, hydrants, and the right contacts—before arrival—supporting a safer, more coordinated response. Looking ahead, Carmel expects Scheduling to return hours of time daily by reducing manual callbacks and streamlining how vacancies are filled.