In this webinar, EPR Fireworks experts and featured guest Craig Weinschenk of UL Research Institutes explore how fire departments are moving beyond NERIS compliance to get more value from their data. The discussion covers lessons from the transition from NFIRS to NERIS, improving data quality and reporting workflows, and how departments can use analytics, business intelligence, and AI to turn NERIS data into actionable operational insights.

Read the full webinar transcript below.

Speakers

• Neil Arsenault, Chief Revenue Officer, EPR FireWorks

• Craig Weinschenk, Director of Research, UL Research Institutes

• Shane Moss, Chief Experience Officer, EPR FireWorks

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Welcome and Introductions

Neil Arsenault:
Welcome, and thank you for joining. I’m your host today. My name is Neil Arsenault. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer for EPR FireWorks, and I’ll be hosting today’s session.

I’m joined today by Craig Weinschenk. He’s the Director of Research for UL Research Institutes and our featured guest. We’re thrilled to have you. Thank you for joining, Craig.

Craig Weinschenk:
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Neil:
Wonderful. I’m also joined by my esteemed colleague, Shane Moss. He’s our Chief Experience Officer at EPR FireWorks, and he’ll be lending some of our customers’ perspective on the data migration and reporting journey as well. Shane, thanks for being here.

Shane Moss:
Thank you, Neil.

Neil:
Wonderful.

Today’s agenda: In part one, we’ll have a conversation with Craig about the national perspective. To set the stage, we’re going to look at the sheer size and scope of this transition for the fire service industry.

Then we’ll get into a bit of the “why.” What was the aspiration and vision for NERIS? What were some of the goals from the onset? We’ll talk about some of the surprises discovered along the way and close out that first session with what Craig thinks the upside is now that we are where we are with NERIS reporting across the country.

We’ll transition into part two and get a perspective from the departments by way of Shane. Shane will share a little about our customers’ journey and where we see customers on what we call our data maturity curve. We’ll share what’s separating departments today along that maturity curve.

We’ll also close with the opportunity that technology provides, including a NERIS Insights demo. This is only possible because of the modernization of the data platform and infrastructure that is NERIS. We can now use business intelligence and artificial intelligence tools to provide greater insight and easier access to that insight.

Then we’ll close with a soundbite from Craig, Shane, and myself on what we think the future outlook is for data and reporting across the industry.

If you’re not familiar with EPR FireWorks, just a quick background on our organization. We were founded in 2016. We are now the records management provider serving more than 600 departments across 35 states.

We deliver a unified, singular software-as-a-service platform that provides incident reporting, patient care reporting, inspection and prevention, workforce, and equipment records management. It also offers turnkey reporting for federal, state, ISO, and accreditation reporting.

It was really built from customers. All of our innovation came from partners like Craig and the NERIS team, or from our customers themselves by direct request.

We’re proud to say that we now submit one in every 20 NERIS records that goes into Craig’s team. We wear with honor the trust and support our customers give us.

Whether you’re a small volunteer department or a large municipal urban agency, we want to thank you for being a customer. Many of our customers are on this webinar today. Thank you for being a customer and for being here. We hope you enjoy the show, and we appreciate your trust in our products, services, and support.

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Poll: Where Are You in Your NERIS Journey?

Neil:
All right, we’re going to start with some interactivity. We’re going to run a small poll here.

The poll just went live. The question is: Where are you in your NERIS journey?

It’s a single-choice question. Make your selection, and we’ll get an anonymous, aggregated point of view and share that.

All right, we’re closing the poll.

Most departments answered reporting successfully. Second place was exploring analytics and insights, and then maybe 10% or so recently transitioned or are reporting but struggling a little bit.

Maybe that’s not too surprising a result, but it’s a good place to check in. This is probably what you’ll hear from us from an anchored perspective as well.

That leads us into our first segment. We’re going to have a conversation with Craig.

To start, as I suggested in the agenda overview, we wanted to get your perspective on the sheer size and scope of this project, which I know you’ve been spearheading. I think I had shared the countless hours you’ve invested in it, maybe even more than you expected.

Craig, catch us up on what the numbers tell you about the project overall and what the journey has been to get to this point.

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The Scale of the NERIS Transition

Craig:
That’s a great question. And yes, I definitely underestimated the time this was going to take. I knew it was going to be a lift. I think the next time I take a vacation will be the first time in over three years.

We’re full speed ahead, and it’s exciting, but it’s been a lot.

I first need to thank and recognize the United States Fire Administration for leading this effort. We are the performer in support of them, and we’ve followed their lead in trying to make this transition as successful as possible.

We started just about three and a half years ago, which is wild in terms of moving an entire country across reporting platforms.

The exciting piece is that, as of today, we’re about 65% of the country reporting. I think 19,869 is the current number. We track it, and every time that number increases, it’s exciting for us.

I think the scale is probably the coolest part. We process around 100,000 records every single day. There’s basically a constant stream of records being submitted.

They’re available immediately in analytics to the folks in the platform. They’re immediately available to be consumed back down for any enrichments to folks like yourselves. Then we automatically send them to the state fire marshal’s offices.

We’ve removed the old process of having to email a ZIP file around and upload it to an FTP server. We’ve modernized that stack, and we do it all in real time.

For everyone on the call who’s already reporting, I think the biggest thing I need to say is thank you.

Thank you for the trust in us in support of the United States Fire Administration, and thank you to EPR and the larger vendor community as well for moving in concert.

To shift all 50 states and all departments in roughly a calendar year was a massive undertaking. The only way it happens is with the fire service — working alongside them and with them to continue to move this forward.

I think the last number on the slide is probably the most important: 60% of all calls are reported within 24 hours of the 911 call.

We’ve changed the entire dynamic of how we can look at fire data at the local, state, and federal level because the fire service has bought into timely reporting, closing records, and then working with the larger integration partner community to send those records via the API when they’re closed.

Now we have insights into what’s happening nationwide when incidents are occurring.

So, again, thank you. I can’t thank the fire service enough. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work on this project and support you all over the last three and a half years, and hopefully for many more to come.

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Why NERIS, and Why Now?

Neil:
Craig, thanks for that insight.

It is impressive — the real-time nature of the data now that the platform has been modernized. Some of those stats are staggering just in terms of sheer volume, size, and scope.

It begs the question: Why NERIS, and why now?

When you think about the vision your organization had, why was this important for the fire service industry? Speak to the timing. What made this come to bear?

Craig:
For sure.

When NFIRS started back in the 1970s following America Burning, it started as paper forms. I might date myself a little bit, but it was carbon copy — the white, yellow, and pink paper with the perforated sides.

You’d fill it out on paper, mail one to the state, one to the federal government, and keep one.

That worked for a long time.

As we started to digitize and modernize infrastructure, and computers became commonplace in firehouses and state offices, we moved from paper forms to digital infrastructure. But it was basically a digital form of paper.

We replaced the mailbox with an FTP server. You’re just emailing the file around.

There’s a lot of risk associated with that, and there’s a lag associated with it. Even though email is fast, the processing time and feedback time all stalled.

The challenge was that the system was running on bare-metal servers on federal infrastructure. You couldn’t update the hardware and keep the same software because the code was old enough, while the hardware was reaching end-of-life and experiencing reliability challenges.

How do we modernize that?

At the same time, we couldn’t rewrite the code just to keep that hardware alive because it wouldn’t support modern code. We were in this catch-22 where we had to upgrade.

And if we’re going to upgrade, let’s rethink wholesale how we move an entire reporting structure into a present-day stack.

Moving from FTP servers and email to API-driven, secure, encrypted communication between systems versus unencrypted email or physical mail — those were the big drivers.

While we had an opportunity to overhaul it, let’s strip everything back. Let’s not just build NFIRS 6.0. Let’s rethink and structurally change how we’re doing all of those things.

That allowed us a lot of flexibility with the data schema.

I’m sure there are folks on the call who have questions like, “Why are we missing this?” or “Why are we missing that?”

We are working to improve it. We’re working on a quarterly release of schema updates from here forward.

It’s really about building the bones. We’re processing 100,000 records, so the API and infrastructure are working. We moved the nation — around 20,000 departments — in the first seven months of the calendar year.

For those who reported in 2025, we thank them as well.

We’ve got a really cool opportunity now. Let’s take stock. We’ve got seven months of data. We’ve heard loud and clear from our help desk, from our partnerships with EPR, and from other folks around the space: “You’re missing this,” or “Why did you do this? How do we improve?”

We’re making those changes.

So the next version, 1.5, when it comes out later this year, will fill a lot of those gaps for the fire service.

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Lessons and Surprises From the Transition

Neil:
Craig, that’s an awesome perspective.

It’s interesting to hear that this is really rooted in the history of the journey of data reporting from firehouses at large, reaching a technological switch point where it was almost necessitated based on the crossroads for software and hardware.

Shane and I can attest, from talking with lots of departments, that I think it’s been a phenomenal success.

But like you mentioned, with data capture, one can’t think of everything. I’m sure there have been some unique surprises along the way.

What are some of the notable ones in your mind? And based on those learnings, what advice do you have for departments generally?

Craig:
There are a couple.

I think one of the biggest surprises was some of the pieces we missed.

For example, agricultural vehicle fires. We missed it. It’s coming. It’s getting added in the next update, so we’ll have those pieces.

There are things like that where I don’t know how we missed it.

In actions and tactics, we missed using ladders. Prior to NERIS, I did a lot of tactical research — search and rescue, ventilation — and somehow, through all the reviews and all the public comment, we all missed it.

It’s getting added.

There are those things where, with all the different data elements, I wish we had it perfect on day one. But we’ll never be perfect. Our mission is to constantly improve.

Those are some of the data schema misses that absolutely caught me by surprise, both from the standpoint of “Why didn’t we think of that?” and “How did we miss it?”

Then, looking at the data, there are two pieces that are still kind of surprising to me. I thought they were going to be more embraced on day one, and we’re starting to see some of the transition.

The first is using the multidisciplinary stack for incident response.

We still see overwhelmingly single incident disciplines or single incident types on a response.

We get it — about 60% of all calls are medical, so they’re probably a singular discipline in most cases.

But when we think about rescues with a medical call, a fire with a rescue type, or a motor vehicle collision with a rescue type, this is the opportunity to truly describe the complexity of emergency response versus having to drill down into the lowest 100, 200, or 300-series number that we were forced to use before.

Many other disciplines — police, medical, and even the airline industry when you look at failure analysis — can have multiple causes and types. There’s a multidimensionality to it.

We’re kind of a lagging indicator here in the fire service.

Let’s actually talk about the disciplines of response that we’re sending to these calls, because those are specialty apparatus with specially trained firefighters who require special equipment.

All of that costs money.

If we’re not telling our complete story, it’s much harder to then say, “Why do we need these resources?”

We’re telling our story in an incomplete fashion.

That’s one area where we still need education, training, and adoption around how we truly tell the complexity of emergency response.

That’s also on us. There’s an obligation here for UL, working with the United States Fire Administration, to get the training out and educate folks on why and how to best discuss these complex incidents.

The second big surprise is tracking rescues.

I think the fire service has embraced the fire-rescue piece of it, but from the civilian perspective, we’re rescuing people every day across all hazards.

Not necessarily the medical-only call, but elevator rescues, rope rescues, motor vehicle collisions where you’re extricating someone from a vehicle — those are all rescues.

They may not carry the same headline news as the fire rescue, but to the civilian, to the people you protect, they’re all rescues.

By tagging the rescue to the incident type in the complex incident, we can justify and show: “Here are the people in our community that the fire service has saved every day.”

If I’m stuck in an elevator and the fire department comes and helps me, I’m going to say, “Thanks for saving me.”

If the civilian is saying that, we should document it ourselves and say, “Yes, we made that rescue.”

I think that’s another piece of the puzzle — shifting our narrative from a loss-based profession to a save-based profession.

Property saved is always going to be a tricky one, but lives saved we can better document.

That’s an opportunity we have in front of us to start documenting that in more depth and breadth across all hazards.

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The Opportunity Ahead

Neil:
Craig, it sounds like complexity is the opportunity, or at least the original discovery from the surprises.

From a vendor perspective, we’ve found the workability with your team has been incredible. Modernization of the schema and adding to the schema are things we have a lot of confidence in.

What I’m also hearing is that there’s an area where departments can gain by creating more complexity in their recordkeeping. That will bring power, insights, and storytelling to each community they serve.

That lends itself to the opportunity ahead.

How would you characterize what you think the upside is now that we are where we are, we know what we know, we had the goals that we originally set out for with NERIS, and now we have a roadmap of where we’re headed?

Paint that picture for everybody so we can get a sense of what you think is in front of us.

Craig:
I think the opportunity in front of us is massive.

Our mission here is to be dynamic.

I see a question in the chat: “How do we suggest changes?”

It comes in all fashions.

Opening help desk tickets — we log it, track it, and monitor it.

We have national engagement periods every year. We had one earlier this year, and we’ll do it again next year and the year after.

Also, work with the folks on this call. Let EPR, or whoever your records management system provider is, know.

As those requests accumulate, they can come to us in bulk and say, “We have X number of folks all requesting something similar. How do we go about making sure that it becomes the standard?”

There are two other big surprises I’ll touch on.

One is the plus-one codes.

We get the question all the time: “Why did you guys get rid of plus-one codes?”

It goes toward the opportunity ahead.

All that plus-one code did was create fracture in the fire service from a data perspective. In talking with the larger integration partner community, there are hundreds of thousands of plus-one codes floating around.

If you boil them down to their definitions, it was probably a handful. But everyone wanted a custom variation.

When you start looking at how you compare to your neighbor, your region, your state, or the federal level, the plus-one codes basically make it really difficult to understand the aggregation.

What we would much rather do is hear from folks.

If something needs to be included, let’s include it. Let’s improve the national standard so we eliminate some of the fracture, because we’re stronger together than with 30,000 different variations of reporting.

The other piece that surprised me was when we removed the numeric codes.

There’s a fraction of the fire service that loved to know, “This is a 111,” or “This is a 745.”

Now it’s plain text.

Then there’s another fraction that said, “I’m so happy I don’t have to memorize the codes.”

I definitely thought there’d be more people in the “no code” group than there are.

But plain text makes it easier to query on the back end and query on the front end.

If you were a loyalist to the numbers, I do apologize.

It was a move toward a modern database structure where we can do a whole lot more with plain-language querying than we could in the ’70s and ’80s when this was initially built.

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Poll: Where Is Your NERIS Focus Today?

Neil:
Fascinating insights and discussion. Craig, thanks for providing this perspective.

Before we transition to Shane, we’ll have another quick interactive moment with our audience.

Poll number two: Where is your NERIS focus today for your department?

The choices are:

• Reporting workflows

• Staffing and training

• Getting value from the data

• Data quality and reporting consistency

We’ll end the poll here in a couple of seconds, but we just want to get a general take on this. Where is your NERIS focus today for your department?

Audience Member:
All of the above.

Neil:
All of the above, yeah — though we’re constraining you to one selection.

That’s great.

All right, we can close the poll.

I think getting value from the data is actually going to be a great segue for the next segment. I’m pleased to see that’s really where our mindset is as an audience from a department perspective.

I’m going to welcome Shane back now, and he’ll share a little bit of the discussion from our customers’ perspective.

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The NERIS Data Maturity Curve

Neil:
Shane, maybe speak to the way you’re viewing the NERIS maturity curve.

You’re working with so many of our departments, getting them live and reporting to NERIS, and then getting them advanced into pulling insights and making better decisions at the department level.

Where do you feel like the majority of folks are anchored today?

Shane:
It’s a good question.

I’d characterize it probably across the entire spectrum.

At this point, six months into it, I feel like the majority, or the base of our customers, are somewhere in the two, three, four range.

Obviously, you’re going to have those departments on the high end of the spectrum — the fives — that have accepted NERIS as it is, see the value in capturing clean data and real-time reporting, and have basically pushed the NERIS transition into the rearview mirror and are rapidly moving ahead.

Then you have the other end of the spectrum, down at stage one: departments that, at the end of the day, are just doing the reporting. They’re filling out the data, they’re checking the box, and they’re doing what they’re supposed to do.

But I think the majority of our departments are somewhere in between.

They’re beginning to find their footing when it comes to NERIS.

They’re beginning to figure out, from a data standpoint, what’s important to them from a data-collection perspective.

As the data comes in, we want the data back out, and we want it out in a meaningful way.

At the end of the day, this is a big change for the fire service.

From our standpoint, NERIS wasn’t just a software upgrade. We were actually changing the way departments think about data and reporting.

Every department starts on this curve somewhere, and ultimately you want to end up as high on the curve as you can.

But it comes down to a couple of things: the size of the department, the technological maturity of the department, and, at the end of the day, leadership.

How much does the leadership of that department want to embrace the data and the change and manage the change?

There are a ton of new insights that we can gain that we’ve never had the opportunity to gain before in the fire service.

Those things are very important.

At the end of the day, EPR is here. We’re here to be your partner. We’re here to help you along this curve.

As you begin to move up it as an agency and move from, for example, basic reporting into operational reporting, analytics, and dashboards, the team here at EPR is here for you.

We’re here to help you build reports. We’re here to help you adjust your data and build rules so you get the clean data you need initially.

To answer your initial question, I think our customers are in a pretty good place.

Six months in, to have the majority of your base right there in that middle-of-the-road space is a good place to be right now.

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Managing the Transition From NFIRS to NERIS

Neil:
You mentioned it was a big change.

I agree it was more than a software upgrade.

Maybe characterize what it was like for our customers. You and your team did a phenomenal job. We had all of our customers live on January 1.

What was it like to go through that transition experience from the legacy platform to NERIS from where you sit as a leader in our organization?

Shane:
At the end of the day, I have to give props to the team. They did a phenomenal job.

We took a little bit of a different approach than some other vendors probably did.

The one thing we looked at, and the thing we tried to keep at the front of our minds, was that the NERIS transition shouldn’t be about simply getting departments through it and making them survive.

We wanted them to transition successfully.

Our approach was to be very proactive.

We took that deadline as just that — a deadline.

We wanted every customer who wanted to change and was able to change by January 1 to have that opportunity.

We proactively reached out. We talked to customers. We had conversations. We built systems and training approaches to ensure these departments could successfully transition and successfully go live on January 1.

The other big thing we looked at with the NERIS transition was that, obviously, NERIS is a new standard, but historically these departments still need to keep their data.

Another big piece of our transition was making sure we provided the tools and means for them to access their old legacy data.

Internally, we did some crosswalking to allow them, at least through these first few years of transition, to run some historical data without having to constantly run one set of data, run another set, and then try to mesh the two together.

We all knew the transition was going to be difficult and year one was going to be a challenge.

The second big thing we wanted to do was make sure we protected their historical data.

The third thing we looked at, and the way we tried to focus our integration, was to make sure the people on the street — the paramedic or firefighter at 2:00 in the morning answering the call and filling out the report — didn’t have a harder job.

We were very conscious as we transitioned workflows to make sure things made sense in the layout.

As a firefighter, paramedic, or whoever naturally worked through a workflow, the software needed to match that.

We collected the data and were smart about how we collected it.

Then another piece was making sure department rules transitioned over so we kept that clean data and helped departments protect their data moving forward.

Neil:
I’m hearing data continuity as a key facet of this transition for our customers.

Part of that was the support and working with our customers and getting feedback from your team, Shane.

One thing I would underscore is the vendor ecosystem and partnering with Craig.

Our product leaders are also talking with you, Craig, directly. It’s been a wonderful partnership, and I think it’s enabled us to be ready to serve our customers and put them in a position to make that transition successfully.

We’ve been able to work with our platform to put the design in place so they don’t forfeit anything from the past, but they get to capture some of the modern transitions and updates that come with this new reporting structure and standard of NERIS.

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Moving Beyond Compliance

Neil:
That lends itself to being six months in and moving beyond compliance.

Now that we’re here and we’re catching up in this conversation, we’ve got this new, modern reporting infrastructure in NERIS.

What can we do with it?

What can departments do to get beyond basic compliance and basic reporting, into an operational norm, and then get to the cutting edge or into the future?

That might lend itself to a quick teaser demonstration, but to tee it up, what do you think that means for where we are in this journey?

Shane:
I think, from our standpoint, it’s understanding that incident reporting is the floor.

There’s so much beyond just getting the data into the system. That’s only the beginning.

To fully leverage what Craig and his team have provided, and what we’re going to continue to produce in the NERIS record system into the future, I think the possibilities are unlimited.

From a leadership standpoint, fire departments need to embrace what this actually means to us and where we can leverage this data as we move forward.

There’s an old saying: garbage in, garbage out.

I think that’s absolutely true.

But in the case of NERIS, we’ve got an opportunity to flip that around and say: quality in, value out.

This new system is going to give us the ability, analytically, to do things we’ve never done before.

From a vendor standpoint, have we made mistakes with this? Have we faced some challenges, especially in year one, with NERIS directly in front of us and NFIRS in the rearview mirror, and figuring out how we mesh those two together?

Yes. It’s been challenging.

But ultimately, future-wise, I think it’s a brave new world.

Surprisingly enough, coming from the fire service, I’ll say that the fire service is embracing it, and I’m happy to see it.

As everybody in the audience from the fire service knows, we don’t do change real well.

So I was really excited to see how this is going.

Neil:
I love the two statements you made.

Incident reporting is the floor.

And then, quality in, value out.

Craig, it harkens back to the surprises you mentioned. If the recordkeeping gets better and we’re capturing the complexity, what we have in front of us is an opportunity to pull a lot more value from it.

Shane, maybe you could show the audience some ways we can pull some of that value — just a quick showcase of NERIS Insights.

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NERIS Insights Demonstration

Shane:
NERIS has its built-in analytics tools — phenomenal tools.

We also have tools for our customer base that you can leverage within the system.

This is our NERIS Insights tool. It’s a tool we developed to allow you to analyze your NERIS data.

Going back to what Craig talked about with real-time reporting, this isn’t necessarily connected to our internal system. This is actually pulling data directly back from NERIS.

This is an example of those real-time numbers coming back.

You can plug your fire department into here. You can plug in multiple fire departments.

You can get an idea through our NERIS Insights tool by looking at your incidents. You can actually pull those data points down and see them.

For things you may not necessarily have directly within your system, you can look at a specific report and grab a view of it.

Then, right down at the bottom, you’ve got built-in analysis of your NFPA 1710 numbers — how quickly you turned out and things like that. A lot of that is built into the system.

From an analytics standpoint, as we move into the future, mapping and actual visualization of the data points are going to become very important.

You can see your calls, your station locations, and do all kinds of interesting things within the system itself.

You’ve got mapping tools within our analytics tool as well.

You’ve also got the analysis. This is a breakdown across the scope of the system of what your department is doing and what you can see.

You can share these things out.

You can build customized dashboards within the system and share them with your stakeholders.

If you want your town council, city manager, or similar stakeholders to have a clear insight into what the fire department is doing, you can publish one of these dashboards and give them clean, clear access into your data space.

I think it’s a really cool tool.

You also have the ability to share with your mutual-aid agencies and your neighbors.

With the permission of the assisting departments, you can come in here and do data analytics and compare yourselves to other departments within the system.

That includes things like forecasting.

We’ve got some built-in forecasting tools, even down to the level of station planning.

You can come in and say, “I need a fire station. I want to put a fire station in a specific location.”

You’ve got a tool here that allows you to see the impact of putting a fire station in that location and how that extends your coverage.

There are also tools for building custom reports, custom charts, and KPIs that allow you to track and analyze your data.

Now that you’re getting data into the system and starting to understand, as Craig talked about, your multiple levels of incident response, you can analyze those things.

And it goes down to the level of AI — asking AI, “Tell me about my data.”

No longer do you necessarily have to try to build and run those reports. You can just ask the system what you want to know.

“How many incidents have I had this year?” is an example.

You can do this through a prompting tool, or you can click on the microphone and actually talk to it.

For example: “What are the most common incident types?”

The AI tool will go through the data and provide that information back.

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Turning Real-Time Data Into Operational Intelligence

Neil:
What I think is amazing is just how structured and accessible the NERIS data is now.

Craig, I think about the triplicate forms, which were obviously 40 or 50 years ago, and then you look at where we are today and how quickly real-time data becomes insightful with an overlay like NERIS Insights using business intelligence and artificial intelligence.

Shane, that goes directly from quality in to value out.

It makes the data instantly usable in an administrative meeting or in a city or town council update.

That data is now power in the palm of your hand.

NERIS Insights is accessible by cell phone as well, so this is an app-driven opportunity for departments that want to get their data on the fly.

That was a teaser.

With the final few minutes here, I think we’ll close with one statement from each of the three of us.

Craig, we started with you, so we’ll have you lead us through the finish line.

From a national perspective, what do you think is the biggest opportunity that will shape the next chapter for NERIS?

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The Future of NERIS and Fire Service Data

Craig:
That’s a big question.

I think Shane’s point about the incident being the floor is absolutely the direction we’re moving.

We’re charged by the United States Fire Administration to continue to enrich the record.

We add weather. We’re adding parcel data. We have VIN lookups in our incident analysis module, and all of that is able to be pulled back down.

I think the more we collaborate and work together across the fire service and integration partners, the more we raise that floor to put the fire service at the forefront of what public data should be.

My ultimate dream and goal would be that when people say, “What is a good example of how public data and public-private partnership should look?” the answer should be the fire service.

That’s our driving mission every day: How do we improve that floor?

Neil:
I love that.

We’re riffing on the floor comment. You’re instantly quotable, Shane.

Maybe I’ll close out with yet another.

Shane, what do you see as the next chapter for NERIS and for our departments that are customers?

Shane:
I think NERIS is the starting line, not the finish line.

Compliance is just the first piece.

As we move forward, it’s about understanding your operations better.

It’s the data, and it’s turning that data into action — whether that’s staffing decisions, risk decisions, resource planning, or all of those things.

The opportunities that exist now are so much greater than what we’ve had in the past.

For the fire service, it’s time to embrace data.

One of the things we’ve always been bad at in government is showing who we are.

Law enforcement, public works, and other city and county departments have always done a better job publicizing themselves.

The fire service has not.

This is our opportunity to leverage our data to tell our story and get our piece of the pie.

Neil:
I love that. That’s also quotable.

I’ll add that, from a technology perspective, what NERIS is to me is a massive data infrastructure upgrade.

Technology has occasional infrastructure upgrades that are meaningful and massive.

Working as a vendor surrounding this data, we’re going through software updates.

The best part about software updates, and where artificial intelligence and business intelligence are heading, is that it never gets worse. It only gets better. It’s progressive.

I’m always looking at technology through rose-tinted glasses in terms of how we, as consumers, can use it and how those in the fire service can use it to protect and serve their communities.

Using the floor analogy, the sky is the limit.

The ceiling is unlimited right now based on where we are, and it’s only made possible through this massive infrastructure upgrade.

I applaud the industry for making the change, Craig and your team for leading the charge, and I’m pleased that we were able to work with our customers and get them to a great place.

Now we’re bringing innovation to bear by leveraging the infrastructure to make data even more powerful in telling those complex stories for each of the fire communities our departments are serving.

With that, we are at time.

I want to thank everybody for joining us today.

If you want to learn more or get more information from us, please don’t hesitate to connect at EPRFireWorks.com.

We did take some questions from the registration. What I think we’ll do is follow up with feedback on some of those.

We’ll also funnel questions that are specific or germane to Craig and his team to Craig so that he has those, and I know he’ll give a best effort to reach out and make sure we close the loop on those as well.

Since we’re at time, I want to thank everybody for joining.

Cheers. Bye, everybody.

Craig:
Thank you all.