How Oakland County Hazmat Uses QR Codes to Manage Their Response Equipment

Customer Background

Oakland County Hazardous Materials Response Team (OCHMRT) is responsible for responding to and mitigating hazardous materials incidents. OCHMRT is part of the MABAS statewide response system and the Michigan State Police Regional Response Team (RRT) Network and the team can be called upon to respond anywhere in the State of Michigan.

Due to the danger and technical complexities of incidents involving hazardous materials, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, the elite team is comprised of specially trained technicians to respond to these unique emergencies. The technicians are select members from fire, police, and public safety agencies throughout Oakland County.

The Challenge

The team operates a response fleet of 7 vehicles and 2 trailers. Each unit is stored by a participating MABAS 3201 fire department. The hazmat team also maintains a cache of over 2 million dollars of specialized hazmat and CBRN equipment. A large portion of the equipment was purchased using homeland security grant funds provided by the State of Michigan and Oakland County. The Hazmat team is accountable for demonstrating that grant funding is spent appropriately when it comes to maintaining the team and their equipment. They needed a better way to track the equipment itself and associated funding sources.

Equipment readiness is paramount for OCHMRT and team members are responsible for providing regular maintenance on the vehicles and equipment. Before implementing D4H, equipment was tracked on a series of spreadsheets. This had proved to be extremely time-consuming and it lacked a sense of coordination and oversight. They decided to look into equipment management solutions that would allow them to go that bit further than just using spreadsheets to manage their mission-critical cache of tools. A key feature they needed would be barcode scanning functionality.

The Solution

OCHMRT deployed D4H Equipment Management as their equipment tracking platform. The team can add fund values and track them until they are 100% allocated by linking items of equipment to specific funding sources. They are now audit-ready with a complete history of what equipment was bought when and with which funds.

“We’ve used D4H for over 10 years now.  When I look back at how we tried to manage equipment in the past using spreadsheets and whiteboards, I can’t even imagine trying to do that now”
— Gary Sharp, Hazmat Team Leader / Program Manager, OCHMRT.

The team has now created a centralized dashboard of all maintenance, repairs, and inspections. They have a digitized inventory they can easily access by category, kind, location, manufacturer, and model. They can also now simply use the barcode numbers generated from D4H and use heavy-duty labels printed from a low-cost label printer to effectively manage their equipment. They use the D4H Equipment Management App to quickly and easily scan an item of equipment to pull up its entire service history or add a repair.

“The equipment app has really empowered our team members.  Every member can use their smartphone to log an inspection or enter a repair”
— Gary Sharp, Hazmat Team Leader / Program Manager, OCHMRT.

Video Overview of the D4H Equipment Management App

Available on iOS and Android, the D4H Equipment Management App enables you to check-in on your equipment from anywhere, on any device to see the real-time availability and status of each item.

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