Tracking equipment and supplies

Two related records live under Equipment & Logistics: equipment, which is durable and has a readiness state, and supplies, which are consumable and have a quantity. They are tracked separately because they fail differently — equipment fails by breaking, supplies fail by running out.

Equipment

Press + Add equipment and give it a name, type, identifier, location and current status. Status is the field that carries the weight: a generator that exists but is out of service is not a generator you can commit, and a roster that does not distinguish the two is worse than no roster, because it produces confident wrong answers.

Change a unit’s status from its row the moment it changes. Log maintenance records the work, who did it, when it is next due, and the status it leaves the unit in. An inspection that finds a fault should leave it Needs maintenance, not operational. Upcoming service then appears on the Maintenance tab on its own, so you find out a unit is due during planning, not during an activation.

Remove deletes the unit and its maintenance log. To keep the history of something you no longer use, set it to Retired instead.

Record where equipment actually is, not where it is assigned. During a response, the useful question is how far away something is.

Supplies

Supplies carry a quantity on hand and a reorder point. When stock falls to the reorder point the item is flagged as low, which is the entire mechanism — and it only works if the reorder point reflects real lead time. Set it to the quantity you need to still have on hand when you place the order, given how long resupply actually takes for that item, not to a round number.

Update counts as things are consumed: the − and + buttons change a count by one, or type the number you counted. The record's usefulness decays quickly once it stops matching the shelf, and a stale count is trusted exactly as much as an accurate one until someone goes and looks.

Resources in an incident

On an incident’s Resources tab, From your equipment list fills in a unit or supply from these records, so it is not retyped, and links the resource to the unit. Units out of service, retired or in maintenance can’t be picked. A unit already committed to another open incident says so in the list, so two incidents do not both count on the same generator.

Here, each linked unit shows the open incidents it is committed to, and it is flagged when there is more than one. Linking does not change the unit’s status, which is still yours to set: committed is not the same as out of service. Retyping the name after a pick drops the link and makes it a freehand resource.

See running an incident for how resources fit into the wider response, and multi-agency federation for requesting what you do not have.

Getting started without a full inventory

A complete inventory on day one is not the goal and waiting for one is how this never gets started. Begin with the equipment that would actually be committed in the first hours of a response and the supplies that have ever run short. That covers most of the decisions you will make under time pressure; the long tail can be added as it comes up.

Availability

The EOC suite is an Agency capability — see pricing.