Scottish Fire and Rescue Service

SFRS achieved digital tax compliance, saved on hosting costs and enabled more collaborative, mobile ways of working by moving to TechnologyOne SaaS.

SFRS’s Lynne McGeough said that with 8,000 staff spread across Scotland—most of which are uniformed officers in the field—connecting everyone through SaaS was a priority.

“We cover very remote areas in Scotland. So it will allow staff that are not always in a station to access and authorise things on their mobile devices and embrace remote working,” McGeough said.

“One of our biggest concerns was resistance to the change from our uniformed staff who used TechnologyOne’s solution quite a bit to do self-service requisitions—we didn’t want them to find it difficult to use the new interface and lose faith, but everything just moved over easily.”

The SaaS solution also quickly proved its worth for SFRS’s back-office support staff. The move was finalised just before the global coronavirus pandemic took hold, which coincided with SFRS’s financial year-end reporting.

“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 proved this was the right decision. Our transition to the cloud with TechnologyOne was trouble free and enabled us to seamlessly move to remote working,” Thomson said.

McGeough added: “When COVID-19 struck we were able to work from home and still operate the finance system at 100 per cent capacity. We didn't have to create workarounds or put different processes in place.”

“It made a massive difference that we could quite urgently just pick up the laptops, go home, and continue as normal. There wasn't a disruption, it was just seamless.”

The SaaS solution is available organisation-wide, with around 2,800 employees using the system regularly for tasks including procurement, accounts payable and requisitions.

In June 2012, the Scottish Parliament passed the Police and Fire Reform Scotland Act legislating for the amalgamation of the country’s eight fire services to form one national organisation.

With a legislated go-live deadline of 1 April 2013, SFRS needed to select a vendor and implement a single financial solution in just 11 months. As part of this implementation, the fire service also needed to consolidate data from the multiple existing disparate systems.

“Some of the services were heavily reliant on local authorities to provide their finance function, so getting buy-in into the concept of a single finance system by 1 April was extremely challenging,” McGeough said.

McGeough said TechnologyOne’s superior demonstrations and expert knowledge assured the fire service it could deliver what it needed within the short timeframe.

“As soon as TechnologyOne came in for the demonstration we knew that it was the start of a great relationship. We were confident that they knew what they were doing.”

This partnership approach gave SFRS the confidence to continue working with TechnologyOne and upgrade to its modern SaaS platform almost eight years later.

“My team is very knowledgeable about what our TechnologyOne solution can do and we're quite hands-on, but you definitely need the support of the vendor to do this,” McGeough said.

SFRS employed a project manager and worked closely with TechnologyOne to address concerns about data integrity and security through rigorous testing during the migration.

“It was a successful and seamless project, and it's really unusual to have a project like that.”

Lynne McGeough said SFRS was taking a staged approach to introducing improvements to capitalise on its new SaaS capabilities.

"This is a learning curve for us. We've achieved the objectives that we needed to for the Making Tax Digital legislation, and the next stage is ‘what can we do with this next?’”

“We're now looking at additional features and functionality that TechnologyOne’s SaaS solution can offer including, approval workflows for remote working, supplier self-service portals and commodity coding for improved reporting.”

McGeough added: “We do see the value of taking an integrated approach to our enterprise software, so we’re looking into TechnologyOne’s Human Resources & Payroll product as well.”