Who is available right now
Each agency keeps its own status from a phone or a desk, and dispatch reads it live instead of from a morning email. Deployable and Recallable are tracked as separate states.
Emergency Readiness Management System
Your own roster is a solved problem. Ten cities' rosters are not.
Every department knows who is on shift and what they are qualified for. None of that answers a mutual aid order, because the people who could fill it work for other agencies, on other shifts, in other records, and nobody has the authority to make any of them keep you current. ERMS shows who across the coalition is available, currently qualified, and next up in the rotation, so the order gets answered from a record instead of a phone tree. Ten fire agencies in the Orange County Operational Area, coordinating through MetroNet, have run it as their system of record since December 2018.
The problem
The report was true at 0700.
The daily availability picture goes out by email in the morning. By mid-morning an engine is committed, a medic is off shift, and a qualification expired overnight that nobody has looked at since spring. The document is still accurate on paper and wrong in the field. The order that arrives at 1400 gets answered from it.
So the order does not fail because nobody could go. It fails because nobody who could go was asked. The answer is spread across independently governed agencies: one knows its shift roster, one knows whose task book closed last month, one sits between the two. Dispatch works down a list, and every agency it does not reach in time is a fill that was available and never counted. Nothing in the record afterward can tell you which ones those were.
Keeping that picture accurate is an operational discipline problem as much as a technical one. Everything downstream sits on it.
What changes
The daily report is gone.
It existed because somebody had to ask every agency what it had and write the answers down, and it was out of date before lunch. In ERMS each agency keeps its own status, so there is no document to compile. You are not reading something that was true this morning. You are reading what each agency last said.
What it does
Every order asks the same four questions.
Coalitions already answer them, mostly by hand. San Diego's operational area publishes its strike team rotation: zone order Metro to North to Central to East, a planned-versus-immediate rule, per-type orderings, reserve positions, and an assignment log back to 2019. It is serious work, and it lives in a spreadsheet. That is the job ERMS was built for. When we went looking in 2018, no product did it.
Whether they can do the job
A person is offered only while their qualifications are current, and a lapsed one is flagged at daily check-in, not discovered in August when someone cannot fill the position. The same check covers equipment, like rope length or a pump rating, which the order itself carries only as free text.
Whose turn it is
OES and locally-owned strike teams share one rotation, filled position by position with approval state. Overhead and single-resource rotations sit beside them.
Who has answered
The request reaches every member agency at once, with the IROC Resource Order Form attached. Agencies offer a named resource or report UTF in the thread, from the field if they need to, and you can see who has not responded. ERMS also recommends the closest available, qualified and fully crewed resources for that specific request.
Adoption cost
Nothing gets ripped out.
No agency abandons a process that works to find out whether ours is better, so we treated switching cost as a design constraint. ERMS runs alongside IROC, CAD and the dispatch workflows you already have. There is no cutover.
Resource ordering is the clearest case. The official order still starts in IROC, and the IROC Resource Order Form is still the artifact of record. ERMS attaches it to the request instead of substituting a form of its own. Dispatch still coordinates. Agencies still decide what they will offer. Same process, same paperwork, same authorities.
Authority
You still decide who and what goes out.
Agencies remain authoritative for their own status. The Operational Area coordinates. Visibility does not imply control, and any override is an audited action.
An agency can withdraw or restrict its own resource availability itself. No support request. No action required by anyone else. That falls out of how ownership is modeled in the data, so it is not a policy Grizzly Systems administers and could change on you. Ask to watch it happen.
Afterward
The question comes later, in a different room.
An operations chiefs meeting. An after-action review. A designation renewal. Somebody asks why that resource went and not another, or how you knew the person you sent was current. Months after the deployment, you answer it from the record: who was available, who was qualified, who was asked, who answered, and when.
Limits
What it doesn't do.
No AI or machine learning models today. Everything ERMS recommends or calculates comes from live data and configured rules, so any answer traces back to the rule and the record that produced it. We tested predictive recommendation in staging, and similar scenarios came back with different answers. Upstream of a life-safety mobilization decision, that was disqualifying.
No native Android client yet. One is in progress and not yet published. Every agency on the platform today is standardized on iOS.
No IROC write path. The order thread has to be reflected in IROC separately.
Statewide live availability is not proven. It exists today for the agencies that keep their status in ERMS every day, which is the ten in Orange County. That is an operational habit, and habits do not scale by adding servers.
Who builds it
Three people, seven years, one product.
Jon Nigg
Owner
Jeff Beltran
Owner
Mike Ryan
Director of Partnerships
Primary contact
We do not change a workflow you are already using during fire season. Fixes to workflows you rely on ship whenever they are ready. Anything that would alter how a workflow behaves waits until the season is over.
Grizzly Systems is a California LLC in Irvine, building ERMS since December 2018. More about the company →
See it
See your own agency in it before you decide anything.
We stand up your agency's own resources, team types and qualification records. Not a sample dataset. You will see your own people and apparatus as your system of record actually holds them, which is regularly where an agency finds something it did not know was there. Nothing to install and nothing to commit to.
If you would sooner see it under load first, ask to watch the Orange County operation.
Talk to Mike Ryan.
He handles evaluations and contracting. Direct line, no form.
Phone
949-573-3027