Greenacres Fire Rescue Transforms Workforce Management with Vector Scheduling

The Greenacres Fire Rescue Department lies in Palm Beach County, part of the Miami metropolitan area in South Florida. With 61 firefighters, the department faced significant challenges in workforce scheduling while it was trying to manage its complex shifts with manual, inefficient processes. “We were using an Outlook calendar and a spreadsheet for overtime each month, manually passed around through shifts. If you weren’t here, you were out of luck,” shared Assistant Fire Chief Phillip Konz.

The manual processes caused errors, fairness grievances, and took up too much administrative time. Additionally, after adding 25% to its workforce essentially overnight, it was clear to the department that its manual systems were no longer going to work.

“We were spending about 40 hours of admin time every two weeks. That 40 hours would have gone up to 60 hours with the increase of personnel,” Chief Konz explained.

Optimizing Staffing with a Purpose-Built Solution

Recognizing the urgent need for a more modern, streamlined approach, the department researched several scheduling software solutions.

After evaluating multiple options, leadership selected Vector Scheduling (formerly CrewSense) due to its cost-effectiveness, purpose-built features, and compatibility with the department’s size and growing needs. “The chief at the time had experience with other systems and found CrewSense met all our requirements,” noted Chief Konz. “It wasn’t just affordable; it had the functionality and simplicity we needed.”

Greenacres Fire brought on Vector Scheduling in 2018 and quickly realized its potential to improve efficiency and alleviate scheduling issues among its personnel.

Modernizing Shift Scheduling for Greater Efficiency and Fairness

The adoption of Vector Scheduling provided Greenacres Fire with a new opportunity to modernize their scheduling processes. By automating processes like overtime callbacks, shift trades, and schedule updates, the department has eliminated previous issues around fairness and transparency.

“We’ve gone from paper and spreadsheets to a seamless system where everything is handled in minutes, not hours.”

—Phillip Konz, Assistant Fire Chief for Greenacres (FL) Fire Rescue Department

Grievances about overtime discrepancies and manual errors are now a thing of the past. With the native mobile app, firefighters can check the schedule, respond to callbacks, and perform other actions anytime, anywhere. “Once we moved to CrewSense and they saw that they could get an app on their phone, they all loved it! There has not been one complaint,” Chief Konz explained. “Now, they get a message—accept or decline—and it moves on. It’s fair, transparent, and efficient.”

Vector Scheduling has saved the department considerable admin time on shift scheduling tasks while strengthening compliance with union rules and exceeding personnel expectations for convenience and ease of use.

Vector Solutions Boosts Personnel Readiness Beyond Shift Scheduling

In addition to Vector Scheduling, Greenacres Fire leverages nearly every product in Vector Solutions’ suite of purpose-built solutions to streamline training and operations management.

TargetSolutions, paired with its integrated hands-on assessment mobile app, Vector Evaluations+, enables the department to track and manage all types of training—online, classroom, and live skills—in one place. “We’re really using TargetSolutions to track all the credentialing and training hours so that when we have an ISO update or anything like that, it’s all in there,” said Chief Konz.

Vector Check It centralizes equipment inspections, truck checks, and secure controlled substances tracking, providing total oversight and peace of mind that crews are operating safely and in compliance. “One of the main reasons we went with Check It, aside from price, customizability, and functionality, was because it wasn’t a completely separate platform,” Chief Konz explained. “It has single sign-on; it’s all right there. It’s just another app.”