As the world’s fourth largest fire and rescue service, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) has faced maintaining a 24/7 emergency response during the current COVID-19 outbreak and Cloud based technology has played a significant role in ensuring they have maintained services to support their operational response.
Emergency services around the world have been responding to the COVID-19 outbreak and have had to quickly and safely adapt to new remote working practices where possible.
Fortunately, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service had launched a new digital first strategy in 2018, which was designed to place SFRS people at the heart of a digital community delivering a safer Scotland. The strategy focused on themes including digitisation, security and resilience.
The service has a long-term partnership with TechnologyOne initiated in 2013, and earlier this year, as part of the digital first plan migrated their core Finance solution to CiAnywhere, TechnologyOne’s SaaS solution
John Thomson, Head of Finance & Procurement, says, “As part of SFRS’s digital transformation strategy we continue to invest and exploit new technologies to improve our service and to future-proof our resilience by moving all systems to the Cloud. COVID-19 has proven this was the right decision. Our transition of our Finance systems to the Cloud with TechnologyOne was trouble free and enabled us to seamlessly move to remote working.”
Stuart MacDonald, TechnologyOne’s Chief Operating Officer, says the ability to be accessed anywhere, any time and from any device, is an obvious benefit of a SaaS solution in a time of crisis – such as with COVID-19 – but it is not the only one. He said, “With so many people experiencing disruption to their working and personal lives – unusual hours, unfamiliar working environments, a lack of face-to-face contact and also dealing with the needs of school aged children – means productivity can suffer and human error increase. A SaaS-based system such as ours helps to mitigate that risk, providing access to real-time information at people’s fingertips and the opportunity to automate regular and repetitive tasks. It’s really the ideal foundation for managing an organisation through a crisis like this,” Mr MacDonald said.
