Police1’s Spotlight articles introduce the products and services of a valued sponsor in their own words. This article shines a spotlight on MCM Technology, an Alabama-based company that started over twenty years ago as a small, family business building software for two-way radio dealerships and has grown into a premier provider of asset management software that helps agencies track what they own and identify risks before anything goes wrong. Chief Marketing Officer Kae Kronthaler-Williams provides background on the company.
What was the inspiration behind starting your company?
We started out writing software for two-way radio dealerships. Then the City of Tampa and Marin County, California, called and asked whether we could help manage their own radio equipment. We said yes, and that answer changed the company.
What we found inside those agencies was a problem nobody had built for. They were accountable for millions of dollars of equipment that law enforcement officers, firefighters and medics depended on every shift, and the system of record was a three-ring binder, a spreadsheet and somebody’s memory. Nobody found the gap until an audit or an incident.
By 2007, we had gone all-in on public safety and built the first asset management platform to integrate directly with radio systems. Today more than 300 agencies run on MCM, including some of the largest police departments in the country, across 2.5 million assets.
Tampa and Marin County are both still MCM agencies today, more than twenty years later.
What is your signature product and how does it work?
Our signature product is MCM’s Intelligent Operational Readiness Platform: one platform covering asset tracking, maintenance and inspections, certification and training, evidence and fleet.
Every capability attaches to the same piece of equipment.
Take one rifle. Asset tracking tells you which officer has it. Inspections show it passed last month. Maintenance tells you the optic was replaced in March and what it cost. Certification confirms the officer is cleared to carry it. If it goes into evidence, the custody chain picks up from there and follows it back into service. The patrol vehicle it rides in carries its own record on the same platform: service intervals, work orders and cost history.
The platform alerts you to what is coming due: gear expiring, certifications lapsing, inspections due, vehicles due for service. The resulting work is created and routed to the owner. A failed inspection generates the work order. A low stock level generates the purchase request. You can also ask the platform a question in plain language and get an answer.
The platform is configured to each agency’s own workflows and terminology, connects to the systems they already run, from HR to dispatch, and is SOC 2 Type II certified.
Why do you believe your products are essential to police?
Because the risk that starts in the back office doesn’t stay there.
Narcan sits in a trunk through heat cycles that degrade it faster than the printed date says. An officer finds out a dose is weak while somebody is on the ground not breathing.
AED pads and batteries, EpiPens and tourniquets have the same problem. All dated, all consumable, and in most agencies all tracked on a spreadsheet someone updates when they think about it.
Then the agency cannot show when the unit was issued, where it was stored or when it expired.
Nothing on paper showing anyone tried to prevent it.
What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?
For most of our history, agencies came to us for one department, radios in most cases, weapons in others. We were good at it and that was usually where the relationship stopped.
Our CEO sat down with leaders at some of the largest agencies in the country. The problem was never confined to one department. The radios we managed were accounted for. Vehicles, weapons, evidence, protective gear and certifications were in separate systems, or on paper or in somebody’s head. When a question crossed those lines, the answer was “let me check and get back to you.” Inside the building, that is an inconvenience. In front of a council member or a reporter, it costs the chief credibility. Closing that gap meant rebuilding around everything an agency is accountable for. Agencies now run weapons, gear, consumables, training, range, fleet and evidence on the same platform.
What makes your company unique?
We spent twenty years managing equipment for police agencies, and that shaped what we built. We organize equipment however an agency needs it: by unit, by location, by kit, by assignment. We also attach it to a person, so the audit trail follows whoever had it, and a supervisor can pull up one officer and see everything at once.
One officer’s record shows the vest and its expiration, the rifle and its last inspection, the certifications that qualify them to carry it, the vehicle they signed out this morning, and the radio they carry. A supervisor can pull up one officer and see all of it, instead of reconstructing it after something has already gone wrong. An agency can have a clean inventory report and still send an officer out with equipment that has not been inspected or maintained.
All of it has to be in one place to see the gaps, because the gap is where the risk is. MCM uses AI to enable this work, purpose-built to proactively inform you of what is coming due before it lapses, without waiting for someone to run a report and notice. A commander or a quartermaster can also ask a question in plain language against their own records: Which officers are due to requalify next month? Which vehicles are past their service interval? Which radios are unaccounted for?
We are also still the only asset management platform that integrates directly with the major radio manufacturers: Motorola Solutions, L3Harris and EF Johnson (JVCKENWOOD). Twenty years of managing radio inventory built that, and it means the programming, assignment and service history of every radio an agency owns sits on the same record as everything else the officer carrying it is accountable for.
What do your customers like best about you and your products?
Our own teams handle development, implementation and support. Agencies tell us they value that the people who built the platform and the people who stand it up have done this across hundreds of departments, so each agency benefits from what we have learned. What agencies ask for goes into what we build. Our first two public safety agencies, Tampa and Marin County, are still with us more than twenty years later and we have kept the majority of the agencies we have ever signed.
Personnel who move to another agency often call us to get the MCM platform in place at their new one.
On the product, it works the way our customers already work. Public safety workflows were built over decades and shaped by state law, accreditation standards, labor agreements and hard experience. Software that requires an agency to change its process to fit the software does not get used. We configure to the agency’s workflows and terminology, which is why our systems get used at the shift level, not just by whoever signed the contract.
We also hear that we pay attention to the individual. A chief needs the agency-wide view. The quartermaster issues a replacement vest and the training coordinator watches for a certification about to expire. Each gets the view their job calls for, from the same underlying data.
What is the most rewarding part of serving the first responder/local government community?
The people we help most directly are the ones who rarely get recognized: the quartermaster reconciling an inventory by hand; the fleet manager keeping a shop running short-staffed; the property room technician keeping a custody chain intact; and the training coordinator tracking certifications on a spreadsheet.
They carry real consequences with very little support. When our platform means inventory discrepancies surface right away instead of months later, or an audit takes an afternoon instead of three weeks, the risk goes down and the job gets easier.
And when the person responsible for readiness has what they need, the officer goes out with equipment that works. That is what keeps us going.
Do you support any charitable organizations within public safety/community? Tell us more.
When one Virginia sheriff’s office added a cowboy hat option to its deputy uniform — a first for the state — deputies were responsible for the cost themselves. MCM donated to the local shop selling the hats at cost, which meant about 25 additional deputies could take part.
We’ve backed gym equipment for agencies that asked directly, and sponsored sheriff and police golf tournaments where the proceeds fund equipment, training and community events the agency runs itself. On the fire side, we’ve supported IAFC chapter fundraising that goes straight to covering required training costs for volunteer firefighters, who would otherwise pay for it out of pocket. We’ve also sponsored the Radio Club of America in past years.
The one constant, year after year: MCM partners with the Trussville, Alabama Fire Department each Christmas to sponsor families in need. Employees adopt individual children’s gift lists themselves and the company covers the rest.
Is there any fun fact or trivia that you’d like to share with our users about you or your company?
After twenty years of building this platform, we’ve learned that “asset” means something different to every agency we work with. Some track their K-9 officers, including vaccination records, right alongside weapons and vehicles: the dog is sworn-in department property, so it gets managed the same way.
We’ve helped task force agencies inventory entire disaster-response warehouses: sleeping cots, MREs, medical supplies, Jaws of Life, even boats and Jet Skis. One department tracks the ingredients for its annual Brunswick stew fundraiser. We also track which trucks run battery-powered versus gas-powered small equipment, because below a certain temperature the gas engines stop working and the battery ones lose runtime fast in the cold.
What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?
Our goal is to track every item and every asset that makes an agency operationally ready. Getting there depends as much on integrating with what an agency already runs as on what we build ourselves.
Agencies have systems they rely on and have no reason to replace, and the readiness picture is only complete if what those systems know shows up in it. HR knows who is still employed. Dispatch knows what is in service. Training knows who is certified. We are building more of those connections so an agency keeps the tools its people know and still sees everything in one place.