I've watched a lot of things go wrong in emergency communications. Bad calls. Bad weather. Bad coffee at 3am.
Nothing — and I mean nothing — compares to watching a CAD vendor sales cycle play out in real time.
Allow me to reconstruct an interaction that will feel painfully familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a CAD demo:
The contract is signed. The check is cashed. Sales is already at the airport.
Meanwhile, back at HQ:
Thirty days later:
And then — because the universe has a sense of humor — the users chime in:
— actual CAD vendor, probably, somewhere
Here's the thing nobody says out loud in the RFP process: the people making these purchasing decisions are being shown a demo by someone who has never worked a shift, never had a bad CAD entry mean a delayed response, and will be on a beach somewhere when your dispatchers are dealing with the fallout.
Your CAD is not just software. It's the spine of every call your center runs. The spacebar matters. The license plate matters. Every field, every second, every keystroke matters.
Ask harder questions. Bring your dispatchers to the demos. Demand the developers — not the sales team — answer your functional questions.
And for the love of everything, get it in writing that the 56X Pro Gold Platinum Cloud Platform Deluxe RAM Dragon Fire CAD™ actually does the 350 things they said it does.