The Fire Protection Podcast: Episode #79 – The Power of FireCAD: Efficiency and Accuracy in Fire Protection

t's snow, so we have the opposite.

August Conte: Yeah.  

Drew Slocum: Oh boy. And you're in Chicago, right?  

August Conte: In the Chicago suburbs, yes. And I am welcoming the warmer weather.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't wait. And then, well, we'll be seeing each other here in probably a few days here, so that'll be exciting. Well, welcome to the podcast, and there's an exciting announcement that The Fire Protection Podcast wants to get out there. Inspect Point, we're partnering together with you guys at FireCAD and coming together as one. So it's really, I've heard a lot from different people. I'm on vacation this week, and I heard people talking about it just as soon as it was announced. It was kind of wild.  

Tony Conte: Yeah, very exciting for us. Having known you for a while, I know we've talked in the past and talked about integration, all the possibilities and didn't expect this one so soon, but we are definitely happy to be here and we have the same result for our emails coming in. Lots of positive responses from customers who use both products and ones that want to know more about it. Very exciting.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, I think bringing the design and install side to that service and inspection side, it just makes sense, right? It's two halves of the businesses. And you guys do some great things on the design side. And I guess for the listeners out there, you want to give a quick intro of who you guys are, where you came from and what you've been up to?  

Tony Conte: Sure. Well, my name's Anthony Conte, and I come from a long history, the family business, and commercial fire with my dad, August, here. He's responsible for getting me into this mess. A lot of us in the industry, we come in with our parents or our brothers, and I think I've been put to task with a lot of different things in our family business. My first job in high school was doing design work, drawing work, taking as-builts from a customer of ours, going out, and my dad sending me out there to survey a building and come in. And we used to actually do this on paper. We used to draw these things on paper. I would get the copier machine with stand pads, making blocks, and putting those on paper drawings to make riser diagrams. And I thought that was great, but after a while, it gets kind of old. 

So, in my history with his company, we moved, changed companies, and went on to a bigger partnership with that business. I continued to do drawings before moving into service installation and inspection myself in the early 2000s. And after that, I got into software. So, software was my life for about 13 years before I inevitably ended up back in the drawing business, doing drawings for my dad here. And we had some big projects to do and no software to do it, and that's where FireCAD came in. So, working on a big project for a couple of years, trying to save, compress three months of labor into three weeks, we found out that it can be done through software. And that's how FireCAD came about. As somebody with all that AutoCAD software experience, I couldn't help myself but to get into working half the time on drawings and half the time making a little program to make it faster. And I remember the skepticism a little bit from my dad. Hey, you got to get those drawings done. You sure you can come up with something on that software? And we actually did. Once I got the first version out of these tools, we were hooked and didn't turn back. That drove a lot of development in how FireCAD works, what it does. And here we are today.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, that's great. So, August, you had the contracting service install business, and Tony worked for you, is that correct?  

August Conte: Yes. So, just to put the picture together, this year I just did a little calculation, and this year I'm celebrating my 60th year in the fire alarm business one way or another. I did a lot of things right that says two things, but I've been involved in every aspect of the business. I was a salesman for fire alarm companies, manufacturers, and so forth. And then at one point, I decided that I wanted to have my own business as a fire alarm systems company. That takes a lot of forms. You can either be an installer, parts, or smarts, or whatever. And so I was everything. And then it was an iteration where I was a fire alarm contractor, and we merged with a large electrical contractor in the Chicago area. 

And that's when the real experience began, because when you're small-time doing little rinky-dink stuff, you don't have the opportunity to do the kind of things that we have done. So after merging with the large contractor, which by the way still maintains the company that we sold them and still is the leading company in the Chicago area in fire alarm systems contracting and installation, Tony went to work for them, and I was working for them, and he was working also for them. And he gained some really valuable experience that he alluded to out in the field, going downtown in the city of Chicago and working on the large high rises and learning all the rules of the game. So that's where his real solid experience is. And he actually became a member of IBEW 134. He was a union guy. 

So that's a little more detail on the story that Tony already presented to you. And the other thing I'll add is that after he created the tool, it was for a company that I had started in 2011, doing shop drawings for people who didn't want to do their own. There's a big industry in the outsourcing of shop drawings. And I was one of the first companies doing that. And Tony provided what we originally didn't call FireCAD. We called it the Automation Toolset, remember, Tony? So, he provided the automation tool set for us to use. So basically, we were using it and being the beta testers for the use of the software that he was progressively developing. And then he took it to its final iteration as an AutoCAD-endorsed official product. And that's where we are now.  

Drew Slocum: That's where we are now. Yeah. So Tony, you saw a lot of the inefficiencies in the design process early on and obviously perfected some of that with your experience. Where does everything, I guess, explain or help explain what FireCAD does from, I guess, 15, 20 years ago until kind of right now?  

Tony Conte: Well, and yeah, it's a good idea to explain. People might not be familiar with any automatic tools. We're finding that a lot of the new customers we have today still do drawings on paper or maybe put them together on a PDF editor. And the complications that cause are a good set of fire alarm drawings, NFPA 72 standard drawings, you're going to have to have these special things on it that are time intensive, not just laying out the shapes where they go or the devices go on the floor plan. But you take that and back in the original days of doing this by hand, you then measure between those strobes on the floor plan, and you get the exact measurement, and you put that into some kind of record Excel sheet. Whatever you can do to automate the process, you will do. 

But it is a manual process where if you have a NAC circuit, you measure between all the devices at the end of your design, you make the calculations, and point-to-point or lump-sum calculations are typical in the industry, battery calculations, device schedules, and a riser diagram. And so for every drawing you do by hand manually, whether you're placing devices in the floor plan with Bluebeam or something manual like that, you can't easily transfer that linked information to automatically generate anything else. You can probably always expect the time it takes you to design the system to engineer it. You can probably expect if it's a week, it's going to take you a week to do those calculations by hand and the riser by hand and you probably will make mistakes on the way or your designers will take shortcuts and they'll copy and paste a riser from another project or calculations and try to adapt. And that's going to introduce errors and mistakes that might get caught when your AHJ looks at that and says, Hey, this doesn't seem to be the right label on this device or the location on the floor plan doesn't match the device on the riser, and that can be resolved by software. 

So the interesting thing about our platform is that when you place these devices, you can just simply ask, What's the length on this circuit? What's the length between these devices? And that lends itself to the first features of FireCAD that we had, where you define that circuit, and instead of taking 20 minutes to make one NAC circuit calculation manually, you can click a button and get it instantly. We know what that is. And of course, extending that, you can build all kinds of standard reports in the industry. We have those standard reports, and we have created all of them in FireCAD based on our user feedback. We have these really talented NICET three and four-level engineers out there, better at this than I ever was, more educated about the current standards and codes. Some of them also reviewed drawings. And collectively over the last few years, since 2015, 2016, since we've introduced this to everybody, all their feedback has been instrumental in creating our reports and our standard output of FireCAD, which has made it better for everybody. We built on a lot of their knowledge and feedback to make sure that when you do these one-click reports, they produce what people want to see. 

And that means instead of taking a week to do a plan and a layout and then spending a week to do the riser and all the reports and all the automatic things that we produce, you'll still want to engineer that plan, make sure the code, the placements, the devices are right, and we speed that up a little bit. But the real savings are when you click a button, and in five minutes, you have all your reports and all your risers done, so you're saving half the time. And we don't advertise like, Hey, we're going to save you half the time. But people tell us all the time that they have doubled their output, they've saved money, they've saved time. And that's the feedback we get. That's why we have such a good rating on the software in the industry, and we're really responsive to those customers' requests. I think that keeps it up to date. We're doing updates all the time to keep it up to date, and that's a great tool to have. In fact, internally, the other component of this is you're getting real-time feedback on the projects I did for my dad. These are big data. 200 NAC circuits, 200 NAC circuits on a big floor plan, a million square feet. If you make a mistake somewhere in the middle, I could always estimate, or if you're doing this manually, one challenge, if you're doing this manually, you may be really experienced in the industry and you say, I can get seven 185 candela strobes on every circuit, so I'm going to manually put this on my drawing. 

Well then at the end of that, if you have all your end of lines on one spot on the floor plan and you tell a contractor to install it this way and you're doing those calculations that are going to take you two weeks to do, what if you're off because of the circuit length somewhere in the middle of the building puts your circuit at a minimum value beyond a minimum 16 volts, you are going to have a hard time because then you're going to have to go back to that drawing and you're going to have to relabel all 200 circuits manually, remeasure manually, recreate reports. It might take you two weeks if you have a manual method of doing it, and no one's going to be happy with you, the sales guy is going to say, Where are your drawings? The project is starting, we need to get this done. And I was on the receiving end of that a lot. Well, while you're connecting these devices and FireCAD, you get real-time feedback. So you get a calculation on every circuit. So if you have a mistake somewhere on the hundredth circuit, you're connecting, you're going to see it before you get to the hundred-first circuit and before you get to the 200th NAC circuit. 

So, as a designer, you can make that change immediately. Say, okay, this circuit is somewhere in the middle of the building, I'm going to take off a couple of devices there, or we'll make the circuit half as long in the middle, and move our end of the line somewhere else. And that's one thing that if you're doing things manually, that's a real big problem. But if you know that while you're connecting and just, I guess you could say, balancing the circuits is the term I use when I'm showing people how to use the program, you know it immediately during the first revision. So you can correct that mistake before you even click the button to automatically generate those reports. And when you're done connecting all 200 circuits, you still get to click that button, and in two minutes, you'll have all 200 NAC reports either exported to Excel or placed on the drawing, whatever your choice to get that data. And that really compounds the savings of what FireCAD does automatically and compared to doing it by hand, or even if you think you're doing it automatically because you're placing shapes in a PDF editor, you're not getting full advantage of a real kind of comprehensive product that's doing everything in the backend.  

August Conte: I think it's worth mentioning that what Tony alluded to so far is the time savings in getting the design done. And so, you get the cost savings of spending less time doing the project drawings. But there's another factor there that I have actually witnessed, and that is the cost of making a mistake on the installation, because the big money isn't in the money. You pay your people to do the drawings. The big money is in the time the contractors pay their electricians to install it mistakenly. And if they do that, and if you, as the designer, are responsible for an incorrect installation and it has to be redone, back charges, and that can be a big factor. So not only do you limit your cost of the installation, but you limit your potential liability for the cost of the mistake that you could cause if you weren't using something as dependable as FireCAD to do it the right way in the first place.  

Drew Slocum: And I see, obviously, we saw some advantages to this. We're on the Inspect Point side, more on the inspection and the service side, but alright, how do we make that more efficient? Can we collaborate with you guys? And I think we're going to collaborate either way, whether we partner fully or not, of like, alright, can we grab all those devices to save even more if you got that service contract, right? You're doing that installation contract, hopefully, and the trend in the industry is toward the service and inspection because it's that recurring revenue, right? So if we can make that even easier for those technicians out there, it's just a win for everybody.  

August Conte: Amen.  

Tony Conte: Yeah. The collaboration between the two is a unique position. We're collecting a lot of information. Some of it's location information, it doesn't all have to be circuiting calculations, but because it's a documentation system, your locations, your devices, even the drawings themselves, we have that full AutoCAD drawing, that PDF output of that vector PDF, the information out of FireCAD could really help somebody in the field as somebody who was out in the field with 90 pages of paper doing inspections at one point in buildings in Chicago and trying to find valves up in the ceiling. And it is a nightmare. But if I had the information from a design that was done and imported that and had it on my tablet and even as a reference could have the drawing there and the device labels, just even starting that inspection project, if we can click a button, get that building data over to the inspection report ready with descriptions, with locations, with addresses as built in the design, it would be just an amazing seamless process. Even taking over a building that you haven't inspected before. FireCAD is a documentation tool that has the ability to document and lend itself to the inspection in that way. So that's what we look forward to.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah. Yeah, it's exciting. August, with all your 60, it's crazy, 60 years of experience, it's amazing.  

Tony Conte: He started really young.  

Drew Slocum: Right?  

August Conte: I was two.  

Drew Slocum: How has the industry progressed with regards to, so I came up through the sprinkler world and suppression world and I know the hydraulic calculations and the basis of that, and that has evolved over time where design for, and it's probably similar to fire alarm, it started getting outsourced to companies that just do fire alarm design for shop drawings and things like that. I guess how has that progressed over the last 20 years to those independent shops just doing shop drawing designs, and where does it sit right now?  

August Conte: Well, that's a very good question that reflects on FireCAD specifically. And I believe that the forthcoming of FireCAD has affected that particular outcome that you're asking about. So prior to 2000, let's say, almost everybody did their own shop drawings, and most people were using traditional methods like paper, pen, PDFs, or ordinary AutoCAD. Those people who were a little advanced would be using ordinary AutoCAD. And so then I decided that I wanted to do those shop drawings. That felt like a good business model to me. And so doing shop drawings for people who didn't want to do their own. And so in the creation of that company in 2011, which still exists today, I don't own it anymore, but it still exists today. I did my research on what the competition was, and in the entire United States, I could only find fewer than five companies. This is in 2011, when independent service providers were doing shop drawings or submittals for people who didn't want to do their own, specifically with regard to fire alarm systems. Today, we probably have 25 FireCAD customers who do just that. 

So I think what happened is we showed them that it could be done, it was a viable business model to just do shop drawings for people. And we provided FireCAD to make that job practical and to be able to be competitive. So we must have 25, I don't know the exact number, but there are a lot. So what that means is that starting to do shop drawings with my previous company and using FireCAD to do it, we developed a lot of competitors for ourselves. But that's okay. It's worked out for the best. You can't hide from competition. When you can inspire competitors and then take credit for it, you've got FireCAD because FireCAD is unquestionably what gave rise to all these people who just do shop drawings. So that's what I see that has changed.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, I think it happens. I learned of one of your guys' big customers, I'll give 'em a shout out. It's JEM, right? Where JEM, where I didn't know about this company until, I don't know, a couple months ago, where they're doing a lot of engineering and shop drawings and for the entire industry, but they also supply, which is, oh man, that's an interesting angle on the whole workflow of a project.  

Tony Conte: And we're seeing a lot of collaboration. What's really funny to me is we get people that love our software, of course, they use it and they want to tell people about it, but they also don't want to tell their competition about it. But yet we see a lot, even though there's so much work in the industry, this is an industry that hasn't slowed down for anybody, as far as there are always buildings, there are always inspections, there are always things to maintain in the industry. Even when times are slow, those buildings still exist. So the customers I have overflow, they would say, well, okay, I'll get a question from another customer. I got this FireCAD project from so-and-so, and can you explain something to me that they did? And it's great because we've got customer A sending projects over to customer B, and they're doing changes over here. They did the initial installation, and then now there's some follow-up. So it's kind of a standard format that's getting passed around, and the drawings are so recognizable. 

I'll get questions early on from AHJs, show me the back end of your calculations, and it prompted us to put our formulas in the calculations. See, put an article up there. But because now the output, of course, of a standard program is a standard drawing, standard fonts, and a standard look. And I think that's to our advantage because now a lot of AHJs trust the drawings more. They see a drawing, they recognize it as one of ours, and it makes it easier for approval. And I think something that I didn't think about early on is now the production is so widespread out there that even that's a good thing.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah. The AHJ side of things, that's interesting to get the approval on the pre-construct or whatever, before the shop drawings are made to get approval from the AHJ. What do you guys see? All right, so we have before, pen and paper, even PDF and Excel are still a thing, right? In all parts of our world, including the inspection side, obviously, we have all the innovations from FireCAD now to make things efficient. What do you see three to five years from now? What does that look like? And are manufacturers more involved at some point? They've always been a big powerhouse. And I think the service providers and the installation contractors have kind of overtaken some of the power of the manufacturers at this point.  

Tony Conte: I think one thing that has happened this last year was, especially since the last NFPA show, we had a lot of manufacturers come to us and recognize that a lot of their customers are using FireCAD. And that's prompted and started a lot of integration. And we are now working with one manufacturer where we're integrating the output of FireCAD, which is now going to program panels. We have that working, and that's something that I think a lot of manufacturers are going to want to follow suit. The other part about it is that I think manufacturers will most likely see more value in FireCAD for the data. 

What do we need to produce, especially now? What are people using out there? How many of these devices, these smoke detectors, are being put into new projects coming down the pipeline? It can affect their production environment. So I see that we're going to add in some analytics capability to FireCAD to allow manufacturers to see that data in real time. I think it's going to be really beneficial and help the supply chain a little bit. Maybe even purchasing, maybe there'll be integration. I think the sky's the limit because we have so much data there ready to use. But this year, a lot of manufacturers are reaching out for that type of collaboration.  

Drew Slocum: It's funny because it's very similar on our side. We have a lot of data once it's installed. Alright, how is it acting, or how is it being maintained over the years, and are there issues with certain detectors or whatever? So you guys have a lot of data on the install side, and then we have a lot of data on the compliance side and inspection side. So yeah, I think manufacturers need to get involved because those workflows are who's buying the product, right? And it's within those software platforms.  

August Conte: I think what Tony just expressed is two things. Number one, that FireCAD is moving toward becoming the de facto method in the entire world of doing fire alarm system shop drawings, primarily the US, the ones that do more of it than anybody, but it has just started to slide in that direction. We're not there yet, but just like AutoCAD is the de facto way to do any digital drawings, FireCAD is becoming the de facto way to do that subset of those drawings specifically in the fire alarm industry. 

We also have opportunities to capture the other low-voltage systems industries, which we can already handle. We just haven't promoted it. But then, beyond that, what Tony's alluded to is the fact that he, as the creative mind behind the development of FireCAD, is not thinking in terms of data extraction. He came up with that. Nobody knocked on the door and said, Can you do data extraction? He came up with it and said, Hey, what about providing data? And so I think that the hallmark of FireCAD under Tony's leadership has been having that creative and open mindset. What can we do? Not what did we do last year, but what can we do now that we have this foundation? And that I really look forward to. It's exciting.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah. Yeah, it is super exciting. And I think the industry, you hit a great point, August, and I think the industry is excited, and it's only been a few days since the announcement. You guys are getting great calls and emails. I've gotten a few, and I think, all right, we have all this data now, let's put it to work. Let's empower those contractors, let's empower those AHJs, and let's discuss how we can solve some of the problems and inefficiencies within the workflows. 

Well, this has been awesome. We're going to do more on FireCAD for whoever’s subscribed to the podcast. I know you guys have a few guests that we will be having on here soon. I guess where can we find both of you? If you want to give a plug for the website or how to get hold of you?  

August Conte: Tony, take it away.  

Tony Conte: Well, our current website to find information about FireCAD is getfirecad.com, and that will put you in touch with us if you need information or simply check out our support site currently support.cadgen.com, that'll allow you to schedule a demo, schedule an appointment, schedule a trial or training with us.  

August Conte: I'll add that our policy with regard to our customers is that if you need it, we'll help you do it. We are all committed to supporting you as you need it, and we have never placed any limits. People sometimes wonder, well, if I buy that software or subscribe to that software, then do I have to figure it out all by myself? No, you don't. We've provided a lot of YouTube videos and phone numbers for instructions. You can go to those sites that Tony mentioned, call support, and get a live person answering. And that live person, many times, myself, Anthony, other people, we'll give you one-on-one, hold your hand, go through it with you, and not tell you your time is up. We will work with you until you feel like you've got all the questions answered.  

Drew Slocum: Yeah, that's great. It's great to hear. The customer, the voice of the customer, is really important. Obviously, Inspect Point will help charge some of that up, too, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun here moving forward. So thanks again, guys, for popping on, and I guess I'll see you next week.  

Tony Conte: Definitely.  

August Conte: Alright, thanks, Drew. We'll see you again.  

Drew Slocum: See you.