Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service

Funding cuts required Cambridgeshire to improve the efficiency and reduce the costs of its processes.

To build an open-standard, collaborative model for business process discovery and development Cambridgeshire integrated IBM® Blueworks Live™ with IBM Business Process Manager on Cloud.

The burden to do more with less is universal, drawing no distinction between public and private sector. ‘Efficiency’ has become the mantra, and IT leaders hoping to improve efficiency often focus first on their organization’s business process management.

Martin Franklin is project manager for Cambridgeshire’s Service Transformation and Efficiency Programme (STEP) and is assisting with CFRS’ response to government mandated cuts to operating budgets in the public safety sector. “The program is really about improving back-office efficiency so we can save money to prevent cuts having to be made to our frontline- our firefighters and fire engines,” he says. “We had to find ways of becoming more cost effective and cheaper without sacrificing operational integrity.”

Mr. Franklin’s colleague, James Thompson, BPM developer at CFRS, heads up the organization’s process automation transformation, a linchpin to the success of STEP. “We recognized that many processes lacked visibility into performance and data,” he says. “Manual, unmanaged processes had to become more efficient. A concept that excited us was Smarter Process—not just replacing spreadsheets, but automating processes.”

According to Mr. Thompson, CFRS has realized a time savings of 60 percent and 90 percent in process development and deployment. “A process that took a week to perform now only takes a day or perhaps a matter of hours,” he says. “So, BPM on Cloud has been revolutionary for us. Developers find the process of developing smarter processes on IBM BPM on Cloud much more flexible. It allows us to focus on the business process rather than worrying about the infrastructure.”

Developers’ initial focus is on administrative processes. “STEP helps us understand how our administrative processes work, improve them and demonstrate that improvement before looking at operations,” Mr. Franklin says. “We’re providing a foundation on which to build processes relating to community prevention, emergency response, public education and firefighter recruitment.”

This foundation has allowed CFRS to become a pioneer among UK fire services, as it uses IBM cloud technology to share administrative systems, data and processes with its fellow services. Plans are for CFRS to partner with the UK Government to drive collaboration and adoption on a nationwide scale.

That goal has already been achieved to a limited extent. CFRS’ first foray into a cloud-based public-facing process, the recruitment of new on-call firefighters, was developed with 14 other fire services for vetting recruits. The process was designed collaboratively with the intention of establishing a common procedure for all fire services. Efficiencies are improving there as well.

“We’ve measured as much as an 80 percent time savings by eliminating duplicate or even triplicate data entry,” says Mr. Thompson. “Not only that, we’ve been able to capture much better quality data, and better quality data helps us gain a better understanding of who is applying to be an on-call firefighter—where they’re from, what their background is and what business they work in as their day job. We now capture that data in a much more qualitative way.”

He plans to move all of CFRS’ in-house smarter processes onto the Cloud. “We just feel that’s the future. It’s more flexible and certainly a lot faster to develop on. But more importantly, we can collaborate on back office processes and with systems that send firefighters out to the incidents.”

The IBM Cloud platform has also expanded collaboration with other emergency services. “We reach out to other fire and rescue services and show them what we’ve done and the efficiencies we’ve achieved,” Mr. Thompson says. “There’s almost zero start-up cost for executing smarter process on Cloud, so those other services are more apt to join us. We could achieve huge efficiencies across the country. IBM BPM on Cloud and BlueWorks is a very promising framework for coming together as fire services and finding common ways of working not only at the human end, but to developing common technical paradigms for the systems integration and data sharing. That’s powerful. And perhaps the thing that excites me most about process improvement on BPM on Cloud is that we can take an incremental approach and see how addressing small improvements can suddenly yield huge rewards.”

Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is the fire and rescue service for the non-metropolitan county of Cambridgeshire and the unitary authority of Peterborough in the UK. The service operates 28 fire stations.