Supporting First Responders with a Reliable Portal

3-minute read

At a glance

When one of the nation’s largest combined gas and electric utility companies needed to replace a legacy first-responder portal with a more reliable site, they contacted us.

Customer challenge

As a regional gas and electric utility, our client is required to maintain an online resource where police, firefighters, EMTs, and other first responders can view maps of gas pipelines. In the event of an emergency such as a pipeline rupture, these maps allow crisis teams to make informed decisions to protect the public’s safety. The portal also serves as a tool for preparing and training first responders on emergency procedures, as mandated by our client’s state utilities commission.

Our client’s existing portal was an outdated legacy system that was prone to outages, leaving pipeline maps and other resources unavailable to first responders for hours at a time. It needed to be upgraded to comply with state utilities’ commission mandates, such as the requirement to provide the public with a summary of first-responder training attendance, and it also needed a way to provide the user login and download data that state audits required. Any edits to the portal content required code changes, which drove up IT costs and delayed critical updates to safety information. Finally, the site also needed to be accessible for users with vision disabilities and optimized for mobile devices to provide a better user experience and to be a resource that could be easily used in the field.

Approach and solution

Logic20/20 had been delivering successful projects for this client for more than 10 years, many of which leveraged our deep expertise in Salesforce. Having worked with their systems and processes in areas such as the corporate intranet, enterprise content management, web capabilities, and others, we were their clear choice for creating a new first-responder portal.

We built a new first-responder portal on the Salesforce platform, which provides 99.9 percent uptime to ensure that critical safety information is always available to first responders in the event of an emergency. The new portal also meets state utilities commission mandates to help our client avoid fines and provides easy-to-use reports that reduce audit response times from weeks to hours.

We developed custom Salesforce objects to allow business teams to update their content without requiring IT support. This reduces IT costs and allows the latest content to be made available to first responders promptly, improving their ability to prepare for and respond to emergencies. We developed the user interface using Visualforce to ensure that it meets WCAG 2.0 AA compliance standards for accessibility; that it is responsive across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices; and that it offers a brand experience consistent with our client’s other websites.

The wins

Upon completion of this project, our client had a reliable, functional, compliant portal that offers first responders the resources and training they need to protect the public’s safety in case of an emergency.