Scots fire shifts services into single financial technology

Eight separate regional Scottish Fire and Rescue (SFRS) organisations are moving to TechnologyOne for a unified financial control and processes.

The move leads to a solo fiscal management, budgeting, procure to pay and reporting platform in order to improve efficiency as well as reduce costs.

TechnologyOne, the contracted enterprise software company announced its successful completion of the first project phase with SFRS on 22 July which took an 11 month timescale.

Scottish Government’s decision to create a solitary FRS 
The Scottish Government decided in September 2011 to create a solitary fire and rescue service in Scotland to replace the existing eight with a launch date of 1st April 2014.

It also decided that a single financial management platform would offer the best benefits in terms of improving efficiency by replacing the disparate accounting systems and working practices and thus a formal tendering process shortlisted three vendors.
Kerr McColl, systems Manager, SFRS, said: “TechnologyOne stood out for us as the system that offered the best combination of features, flexibility and a competitive price.

“The service is also going through an evolution process and change is bound to happen. We liked the fact that the system was flexible enough so we could carry out many of these changes ourselves without having to rely on external consultants.”

SFRS has a £277M annual budget and relies on over 9000 staff, equipment and a 24 hour technology for its fire-fighters to attend to over 90,000 incidents each year and behind the scenes.

It took nine months for the fire service to setup and migrate to the new centralised platform system switch within the eight regional organisations which had to be on time for the 1st April 2013 financial year start.

The task included process mapping, re-engineering, data migration and extensive payroll interfacing as well as providing a secure connection to the new financial platform across the eight existing IT infrastructures for authorised users.

Positive reception from the new system
There are still areas that SRFRS would like to explore within the software company but reception from its users has been extremely positive and the system will help them on a journey to improve efficiency of the service.

Plans for phase 2 of the project involve the implementation of Fixed Assets and a continuous development of the system, business processes and management information through the flexible functionality it provides.

Following a close collaboration with SFRS and its customers in UK’s asset intensive industries, TechnologyOne has launched a preconfigured enterprise software solution for emergency services market.

TechnologyOne’s OneFRS reduces costs, risks, implements time and supports these organisations with the ability to manage essential operational services, community engagement projects, fleets, property assets, people and stakeholders.