Frisco, Texas, added indoor mapping of its city buildings in 2008 to improve emergency response, but it’s now using it for a range of benefits, according to an information technology expert who helped create the program. The Situational Awareness for Emergency Response, or SAFER, program was conceived as a way to provide first responders with school floor plans to better ensure the safety of students in emergencies. Built on a geographic information system foundation, it provides emergency responders, control staff and dispatch with a common operating picture that includes access to critical incident information at school buildings. The system uses pre-plan documents for specific schools, including up-to-date contact information for administrations. Floor plans include visual data like room names and numbers, the location of nurses’ offices and administration areas, where hazardous chemicals are stored and roof access. It also integrates facility video cameras represented on floor plans with a hyperlink, enabling live video stream access, the city says on its website. Implementation required significant work from the city’s IT team to perform hardware upgrades and installation, software development, integration development and the creation of training material and documentation, the city says. As it began to see benefits from indoor mapping, the city expanded the program to other facilities, combining it with ArcGIS Field Maps and other ArcGIS technology from Esri, and now maintains real-time building data with complete indoor mapping of over 200 facilities. This includes hospitals, the corporate headquarters of the National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys, their mall and event venues. “It integrates over 30 different disparate systems into one geospatial platform, so [emergency responders] have a really good view of what’s going on for emergency response,” Susan Benedicto, the city’s assistant director of information technology for geospatial solutions, told Facilities Dive. “But a lot of the data that