KEY IDEAS:
- CFAI accreditation requires fire departments to analyze large volumes of granular response and operations data pulled from multiple disconnected systems, creating a tedious, time-consuming reporting process.
- Though software solutions that streamline accreditation reporting exist, they are often narrowly focused and non-interoperable with agencies’ existing data systems.
- Before Peregrine, St. Petersburg Fire Rescue dedicated at least 40 hours per year to the CFAI accreditation process — a workload that became unsustainable alongside a rising call volume.
- Now, Peregrine unifies all of St. Pete Fire’s relevant data sources on one platform that auto-generates the exact analyses CFAI requires for accreditation reporting.
- A process that used to cost more than 40 labor hours per year, often consuming personnel’s evenings and weekends, now takes just minutes.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — St. Petersburg Fire Rescue (SPFR) has held accreditation from the Commission on Fire Accreditation International (CFAI) since 2002, making it one of just 334 CFAI-accredited agencies worldwide. To maintain accreditation, SPFR personnel spend months each year completing CFAI reporting while also balancing day-to-day operations and staffing constraints.
Since Ciskoski became SPFR’s accreditation manager in 2016, the agency’s call volume has risen by around 30% — without increased resources to match. Meanwhile, CFAI’s accreditation process has grown increasingly complex and time-consuming.
To streamline reporting workflows, SPFR is partnering with Peregrine to integrate the agency’s disparate data sources and automate analyses.
“You can imagine how labor-intensive those calls are while you're also trying to put together accreditation reports,” SPFR Deputy Chief Brett Ciskoski told us. ”With Peregrine, we’re building an accreditation package that is going to give us all the information we need to complete those accreditation reports — the community risk assessment, the annual compliance reports — in minutes, instead of days.”
Using Peregrine for fire-rescue accreditation reporting will save SPFR at least a full workweek per year.
”Saving time is more important to me than almost anything,” Ciskoski said. “There are only so many hours in the day where you can make things happen. So if you have the opportunity to save you hours, you want to do everything you can to make that happen.”
What is CFAI fire accreditation, and why does it matter?
Housed within the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE), CFAI oversees an international accreditation program that validates performance for fire-rescue agencies. The program follows a continuous improvement model in which agencies are benchmarked against themselves, not each other, and held accountable for consistently improving over time. Agencies renew accreditation on a five-year cadence.
💡 HOW COMMON IS CFAI ACCREDITATION?
Only 14% of the U.S. population is served by CFAI-accredited agencies, largely because the accreditation process requires time-consuming data analysis and documentation.
What does CFAI accreditation measure?
CFAI’s accreditation model considers 11 categories of performance:
- Assessment and planning
- Community risk reduction programs
- Essential resources
- External systems relationship
- Financial resources
- Goals and objectives
- Governance and administration
- Health and safety
- Human resources
- Physical resources
- Training and competency
Within those 11 categories, agencies must report metrics across 92 criteria and 250 core competencies and performance indicators.
Why does CFAI accreditation matter?
Analytics, documentation, and reporting requirements for CFAI accreditation create a demanding and time-consuming process — but for SPFR, it’s worth it. Accreditation validates fire-rescue agencies’ performance and progress to community and government stakeholders, encouraging community alignment, quality improvement, and data-driven decision-making.
”What’s required in today's day and age is to show the people you answer to — elected officials, budget managers, citizens — how good your department is without them actually riding on your trucks, watching you perform. And the only way to do that is through data,” Ciskoski said. “Being accredited validates that your deployment is where it's supposed to be, your apparatus are where they’re supposed to be, and you're spending money on the right things.”
Because the CFAI accreditation process is such a heavy lift, smaller agencies often lack the resources needed to go through it. But by automating the most tedious workflows, a solution like Peregrine can bring accreditation within reach.
”There are some agencies I’ve tried to help with accreditation, but they got frustrated, mostly because they didn’t have a tool like Peregrine that would have made life a lot easier,” Ciskoski said. “They were struggling.”
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Before Peregrine: The manual reporting burden
Though CFAI accreditation follows a five-year renewal cycle, it also requires an annual compliance report in non-renewal years, making accreditation reporting an ongoing responsibility. Agencies seeking to obtain or renew CFAI accreditation must compile and submit thousands of pages of documentation, including:
- A community risk assessment
- Standards of cover
- A community-driven strategic plan
- A self-assessment of all segments of the agency
- An annual compliance report in non-renewal years
Without an effective integration solution to streamline analytics and reporting for the above documents, fire-rescue agencies must manually pull and evaluate data from several disparate sources on an ongoing basis, including:
- Computer-aided dispatch (CAD)
- Records management system (RMS)
- Emergency response software
- Staffing management system
- Inventory tracking system
- Fire hydrant management software
- The National Weather Service
- State-level emergency management data
An unsustainable workload
Before SPFR deployed analytics software to streamline accreditation reporting, Ciskoski and an administrative assistant had to manually extract, compile, and analyze the required data, creating a significant burden on top of their regular full-time roles.
“We had very long days, and this was a side project for both of us,” Ciskoski said. “We had our regular duties as a district chief and the assistant fire chief’s admin assistant. So we were both working on this outside of our regularly scheduled hours.”
Meanwhile, CFAI continued adding more categories to its self-assessment process and more data requirements for agencies’ annual compliance reports — all while SPFR’s personnel faced a rising call volume and staffing shortages,
Limited options for data analytics software
Though traditional data analytics solutions may automate portions of the CFAI accreditation process, they often come with restrictions, such as only integrating certain data sources or only working with specific tech providers.
For example, in 2022, SPFR deployed a platform that streamlined much of the data analysis required for accreditation reporting — but the platform only ingested CAD and RMS data. And when Pinellas County switched RMS vendors in 2023, the new provider was not compatible with SPFR’s data analytics platform. This severed the connection between the county’s RMS and SPFR’s analytics software, sending the agency back to the drawing board.
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With Peregrine: Automating accreditation reporting
”With Peregrine, we’re building an accreditation package that is going to give us all the information we need to complete those accreditation reports — the community risk assessment, the annual compliance reports — in minutes, instead of days.” —Brett Ciskoski, Deputy Chief, St. Petersburg Fire Rescue
In his search for a new CFAI analytics program, Ciskoski found a solution that can integrate any type of data, both historical and real-time, from virtually any source. Rather than limiting integration to CAD and RMS data, Peregrine can ingest all data relevant to accreditation — including staffing data, apparatus inventory, fire hydrant data, and open source weather information — into one unified, vendor-agnostic platform.
”With our old software, the tie-in with all the other data sources or programs we use wasn’t available,” Ciskoski said. “That’s one of the biggest benefits of Peregrine. We can filter everything through it, and it’s smart enough to put the data where it needs to be so we can easily identify it, analyze it, and use that analysis to make our decisions. Instead of having to piece together multiple different programs to get one outcome, we can do it all in one place.”
Data analysis and visualizations
Agencies seeking CFAI accreditation are expected to analyze operational performance by risk category over a five-year period, typically reporting at the 90th percentile for each risk classification. Typical operational metrics include:
| Metric | Typical Breakdown |
|---|---|
| Call processing time | Dispatch answer → dispatch notification |
| Turnout time | Notification → unit en route |
| Travel time | En route → arrival |
| Total response time | Call received → arrival |
| First unit arrival | By risk category |
| Effective Response Force (ERF) arrival | Time for full complement of resources |
| Response reliability | Percent of incidents meeting adopted standards |
| Unit availability | Percent of time units are available |
| Simultaneous incident rate | Overlapping incident workload |
| Station workload | Incidents per station or unit |
| Unit utilization | Calls per apparatus or crew |
| Geographic coverage | Population and area served within adopted response goals |
By ingesting, integrating, transforming, and modeling data, Peregrine can auto-generate analyses and visualizations for all CFAI-required metrics. In Peregrine, this process — which may take days or even weeks to complete manually — is done in just minutes.
Benefits beyond accreditation
“As you work through the year on that continuous improvement process, having a program like Peregrine will save you time.” —Brett Ciskoski, Deputy Chief, St. Petersburg Fire Rescue
Peregrine’s operational benefits extend beyond reporting and time savings. Ciskoski sees the platform as a tool for continuous improvement — the true goal of CFAI accreditation.
”The tool we’re looking for is not just for accreditation,” he said. “I want to take every data source we have — training, staffing, emergency management, prevention, high-risk calls, incident data, weather, all of it — and put it into dashboards for everybody here to use, not just for accreditation, not just for ISO, but for EMS continuous improvement, prevention tracking, training tracking.”
Ciskoski envisions using Peregrine to track individual firefighters’ performance and wellness indicators with custom-built “baseball cards” incorporating staffing and incident data. Also, Peregrine’s dynamic, interactive data visualizations let viewers click into any component to review the underlying source information at a granular level, empowering leaders to dig beyond the “what” of their agencies’ performance to better understand the “why.”
”You’re supposed to continue to work throughout the year to make yourself better, and that’s what we do,” Ciskoski said. “We run those metrics and see if it’s taking longer than usual to get to the truck, or to get to a call, and we want to know why. We work toward that continuous improvement. As you work through the year on that continuous improvement process, having a program like Peregrine will save you time.”
The impact: From weeks to minutes
- Time savings: Peregrine will save St. Pete Fire Rescue at least 40 hours of manual calculations and validations for CFAI accreditation reporting per year. Personnel previously performed that work daily, on top of their regular duties and often during their off-hours, across a five-month stretch each year.
- Scale: SPFR’s annual call volume has increased by around 30% over the last decade, from approximately 50,000 calls per year to now more than 65,000. Even as the agency logs more and more incident data, Peregrine ingests, integrates, analyzes, and visualizes that information in just a few minutes — no extra staff or labor hours required.
- Scope: Even with SPFR’s previous data analytics software, the agency relied on a combination of automated and manual analyses of data from disparate, siloed source systems to complete the CFAI accreditation process, ISO reporting, and other improvement initiatives. Now, one platform automates the workflows required for all of those purposes.
- Reinvested time: Hours previously spent manually pulling data and calculating performance metrics can now be redirected to validation and writing the peer-review-facing work that actually requires human judgment.
- Reporting depth unlocked: Metrics that were once too labor-intensive to calculate routinely will now be sustainable to report on an ongoing basis.
Modernize your accreditation reporting
Over the last decade, St. Petersburg Fire Rescue has taken its accreditation reporting methods from fully manual to partially automated, and now to a comprehensive solution that integrates and instantly analyzes data from all types and sources.
In Peregrine, workflows that once took SPFR personnel days or even weeks to complete will now take minutes, transforming accreditation reporting from a tedious, time-consuming burden into a robust, streamlined strategy for continuous improvement. To learn how Peregrine can streamline the CFAI accreditation process for your agency, book a demo.
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