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

Register equipment with its 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.

Log maintenance as it happens. Upcoming service then surfaces on its own, which is the difference between discovering a unit is out of service during planning and discovering it during an activation.

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 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.

Committing resources to an incident

From an incident, resources are drawn from these records rather than typed in freehand. That gives you one place where equipment is defined and a live picture of what is committed where — which matters most when two incidents are running and both want the same unit.

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.