Background

Charleston Fire Department’s Fire Marshal Office supports a high-volume, all-hazards organization protecting a historic coastal city. Like many agencies, the department had accumulated a patchwork of systems over time—creating friction for field users and inefficiencies for prevention staff.

Challenge

Before First Due, Charleston was coming off an end-of-life RMS and navigating multiple point solutions across the department. For prevention workflows in particular, plan review and inspection processes involved double entry—building a document in one place, then re-entering the same information into the inspection system.

At the same time, the department wanted to be more proactive with repeat alarm activation locations and improve the visibility and handoff of hydrant issues between operations, the Fire Marshal Office, and external water partners.

Solution

Charleston adopted First Due across a broad set of modules—including incident reporting, inspections, pre-plan, hydrants, assets, and investigations—with a clear goal: consolidate work into one login and one operational picture.

On the prevention side, the team implemented:
Plan reviews as an inspection workflow, using checklists and automated approval/notification forms.
Configurable inspection forms based on outcomes (pass / needs correction), reducing manual rework.

For hydrants, operations crews now use:
A checklist-driven hydrant service workflow (pass/fail), generating reports to prevention and partner utilities.

For false alarms, the Fire Marshal Office uses reporting to:
Run daily/monthly views of alarm activations.
Assign follow-up inspections to focus on repeat locations.

Results

The impact shows up in both time savings and clarity:
Plan reviews: By removing double entry and standardizing checklists, certain plan reviews dropped from 20–30 minutes to under 10, with the department describing the change as cutting plan review time in half.
Hydrants: Field crews complete hydrant service in ~15–20 minutes, and issues are tracked and shared more consistently—reducing the prevention team’s time spent chasing email threads.
Alarm activations: With a program focused on repeat offenders, Charleston reports a downward trend from a prior baseline where alarm activations accounted for ~19–20% of call volume.