The vendor is required to provide mass notification system upgrade project is to replace the existing ReadyOp system with a modern, integrated solution that enhances emergency communication, operational alerts, and compliance tracking across all agency divisions.
- The current system requires manual maintenance of rosters and distribution lists, lacks real-time automation, and does not integrate with workday, computer-aided dispatch (“CAD”), or public address (“PA”) systems—leading to inefficiencies, delays, and redundant notifications.
- The new system will support automated notifications, role-based access, multi-channel messaging (SMS, email, public address, radio), and real-time acknowledgment tracking to improve response coordination and compliance.
- Functional requirements
1. Administration and management
• The ability to enable role-based notification permissions to control who can send, receive, and acknowledge different types of alerts, ensuring compliance with internal policies.
• The ability to bulk upload and remove users from notification lists using spreadsheet imports and HR system integrations.
• The ability to automate removal of inactive users based on HR system employment status, ensuring separated employees no longer receive notifications.
• The ability to send targeted notifications based on predefined geofences, allowing location-based alerts for incidents affecting specific facilities, transit routes, and mobile personnel. (ex. support for temporary locations and mobile tracking of personnel, rather than just fixed assigned locations.)
• The ability to filter notification recipients based on their real-time or last-known location, ensuring that only personnel within or near the affected area receive relevant alerts
2. System integrations and automations
• The ability to integrate contact lists with computer-aided dispatch d for real-time incident alerts, ensuring dispatchers have up-to-date contact information when responding to emergencies.
3. Administration and administration and management
• The ability to allow users to opt into or opt out of notification groups.
• The ability to allow notification administrators to manage contacts centrally
4. Bus dispatch operations
• The ability to integrate bus and rail dispatcher notifications with mass notification systems to ensure real-time dissemination of service-impacting alerts across all transit operations.
• The ability to allow dispatchers to send alerts about facility maintenance issues, including predefined categories such as HVAC failures, electrical malfunctions, and safety hazards, ensuring proper escalation.
• The ability to categorize emergency calls using pre-set priority levels
• The ability to allow delegated personnel to initiate notifications during emergencies.
• The ability to escalate notifications based on incident severity.
• The ability to notify different teams based on a predefined escalation process, restricting alerts to relevant personnel depending on the severity of the situation
5. Reporting and auditing
• The ability to provide real-time updates on notifications for all recipients
• The ability to maintain historical logs of mass notifications for compliance and auditing.
• The ability to allow supervisors to audit past notifications for compliance, including message content, recipients, and acknowledgment records.
• The ability to archive notifications for compliance and record-keeping, ensuring that all alerts are stored for post-incident review and legal requirements. ex. three year minimum
• The ability to provide statistics on notification delivery and failure rates, identifying issues such as message bounces, blocked numbers, or unread messages.
• The ability to track and report average call response times and resolution times.
• The ability to review notification logs for audit and compliance checks.
• The ability to track and log notification recipients who did not receive or acknowledge alerts.
• The ability to track and report the time between event occurrence and notification sent.
• The ability to display response rates for critical notifications.
• The ability to provide a real-time dashboard for notification monitoring.
6. System integrations and automations
• The ability to integrate notifications with public announcement (pa) systems in transit facilities.
• The ability to integrate notification system with HR systems for automatic personnel updates, ensuring new hires and role changes are reflected in all systems at once.
• The ability to support mobile-friendly mass notification access, ensuring staff can send and receive alerts via smartphones and tablets.
• The ability to support two-way messaging for mass notifications, allowing recipients to acknowledge or respond to alerts when necessary.
• The ability to integrate notification system with existing radio systems to enable voice-based mass notifications for personnel using radio communications.
• The ability to integrate notification system with phone systems for voice notifications, ensuring alerts can be sent via automated phone calls.
• The ability to automate mass notifications when specific triggers are met, such as weather alerts, system outages, or security breaches
• The ability to integrate notification groups with active directory.
• The ability to consolidate duplicate notification lists and prevent redundant notifications
• The ability to send mass notifications to onboard bus operator dashboards.
• The ability to provide API-based integration for mass notifications
7. Facility maintenance alerts
• The ability to escalate facility-related alerts to relevant departments automatically, ensuring that unresolved issues are reassigned and elevated based on severity thresholds
• The ability to enable supervisors to send quick facility-wide notifications via SMS, email, and in-system alerts to all relevant staff, allowing rapid coordination in emergency situations.
• The ability to create notification groups for facility maintenance teams.
• The ability to send follow-up notifications when maintenance is complete
• The ability to integrate public announcement (pa) system notifications for maintenance alerts.
8. IT notifications
• The ability to automate it incident notifications based on severity level (e.g., priority 1 (p1) for critical outages, priority 2 (p2) for degraded performance), ensuring impacted users receive timely alerts via multiple channels.
• The ability to categorize it service disruptions as priority 1, priority 2, or priority 3, ensuring clear prioritization of technical issues.
• The ability to allow employees to opt into different it notification severities by administration allowances and role assignments.
9. Mass notification processing
• The ability to provide a standardized notification template across departments that prepopulates incident details such as location, severity, and response actions, reducing manual input errors.
• The ability to categorize notifications based on incident severity, ensuring consistent messaging across the agency.
• The ability to automate mass notifications based on preconfigured incident types, allowing dispatchers to send alerts with minimal manual intervention.
• The ability to send predefined emergency alerts based on policy-defined criteria (e.g., active shooter, fire evacuation), reducing response times during critical incidents.
• The ability to classify notifications by priority (red: immediate response, yellow: important but not urgent) to standardize communication protocols across the organization.
• The ability to ensure that all mass notifications initiated by any communication center are automatically relayed to transit police communications for situational awareness and oversight.
• The ability to automatically convert mass notifications text to speech for audio and pa channels. (ex. supporting SMS, email, in-app alerts, and text-to-speech audio messages for pa systems in transit facilities.)
• The ability to send attachments such as images or documents with mass notifications.
• The ability to allow manual selection of additional recipients to mass notifications, as needed.
• The ability to define different notification groups by location and incident type.
• The ability to assign specific notification recipients based on operational divisions.
• The ability to allow dispatchers to send notifications only to relevant personnel
• The ability to escalate incidents requiring mass notification via preconfigured escalation pathways.
- Pre-proposal briefing (Non-Mandatory) Date: May 22, 2025
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: May 22, 2025