CASE STUDY

Industry Sector - Government

Process Automation within Emergency Services

Scenario:

As part of their plan to improve administrative efficiency and meet government electronic service delivery targets, a large emergency services provider wished to implement a range of web-delivered business applications that could automate and validate data processing tasks and leverage the capabilities of existing departmental applications. Rather than focusing on the replacement of legacy applications, the solution was required to interact directly with their existing mobilisation, finance, HRM, email and standard desktop applications such as word processing.

Background:

The emergency services organisation provides cover 24 hours a day, 365 days a year from 20 locations within its regional jurisdiction. Its area includes one of Europe’s busiest motorways and large urban centres, suburban communities and also major rural areas.

Its 600 highly-trained front line staff attend some 12,000 incidents every year, ranging from road and rail accidents to fuel and chemical spills, aviation and waterway accidents, collapsed buildings, large animal rescues and fires.

Following an exhaustive examination of workflow and business process management solutions, the emergency services provider selected FloSuite as the ideal application to fulfil their three key requirements: web delivery, flexible process definition (without requirement for scripting or programming skills) and rapid integration capability.

Implementation:

An ambitious three-week timescale was set for the first implementation project. Within this deadline, in-house technical staff were trained and, with minimal assistance from consultants at FloSuite Ltd, designed and deployed a fully-functioning stores requisitioning system with links to stock control, finance and HRM applications.

The IT Manager said: “As extensive scripting or programming is not required to define and update workflows with FloSuite, we were able to directly translate our process knowledge into a complete solution within just three weeks, without using additional IT resource that would have been needed to write custom code. This rapid implementation capability was one of the things that initially made FloSuite so attractive to us. The fact that our speedy deployment completely validated the sales proposition was extremely reassuring.”

The initial contract was for supply and implementation of FloSuite software for managing accident investigations, stock requisitioning and data integrity checking, with an incremental roll out to other process areas in future months.

Business Benefits:

By deploying FloSuite, the emergency services provider has implemented a solution with the flexibility to enable timely development and roll out of future web-delivered applications that can support interaction between multiple legacy systems and collaborative working practices that can link to multiple departments, external organizations and members of the public.

The IT Manager said: “We required a solution that could be implemented rapidly across different operational areas, but which had the flexibility to deliver implementations specifically designed for each target application area. We found that FloSuite was best suited to deliver this because other solutions on the market required extensive technical and supplier input in the capture and amendment of business processes and user interfaces – inflating delivery timescales and costs. With FloSuite, we believe we can progress to the next level of internal systems integration and external electronic service delivery in line with our long term goal of offering services, internal and external, through a fully customised web interface.”

In summary, the key business benefits gained include:

  • Reduced deployment costs due to FloSuite’s rapid implementation capability and no reliance on IT resource to provide extensive scripting or programming services
  • Facility to expand the FloSuite operating environment and applications across all areas in a structured, incremental manner
  • Comprehensive support for integration, automation and collaborative team-based working practices across departments, and with public and partner organisations
  • Comprehensive audit trail and effective risk management

Technical Overview:

There were a number of technical and operational criteria that the client specified. These were that the FloSuite solution should:

  • Provide a virtual application layer that could link its legacy applications, internal users, the public and partner organisations
  • Allow business analysts to directly define, add to and amend workflows without additional scripting or programming skills
  • Support Web-enabled information delivery and input to enable direct access to relevant information and interaction with processes online 24/7
  • Provide automatic scheduling for reports, documents and actions – with clearly defined escalation procedures
  • Supply a full audit trail for efficient tracking and risk management
  • Provide an easy-to-use Web-based forms interface
  • Be built using leading edge technology with a minimum 10 year technical life expectancy
  • Integrate with legacy systems, leading third party applications and industry standard diary, email and messaging systems
  • Only require maintenance of one skill set, simplifying training and reducing the cost of ownership

Summary:

The flexible and intuitive process definition model offered by FloSuite enabled staff at the emergency services provider to transform key business processes into a web-delivered model without amendment to underlying legacy applications in just three weeks – from the beginning of product training to ‘switch-on’. Not only did this deliver results at rapid pace, it also kept implementation costs to a minimum. Using FloSuite, the client was also able to construct replacement solutions that enabled them to dispense with some legacy applications, delivering further cost savings and improvements in services to their end users.