Scottish Fire and Rescue Services uses Nintex for Office 365 to reduce human error
Elly Yates-Roberts |
Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS), the world’s fourth-largest fire and rescue service, delivers front-line services across Scotland, responding to fires and other emergencies. The organisation has a total staff of 8,000, including full-time firefighters, as well as 3,400 Retained Duty Service (RDS) crew members and volunteer staff who serve the country’s remote and rural communities.
RDS crew members logged their hours of service at the fire station on paper. These forms would then be manually entered in a monthly spreadsheet for each station. This data would be used to determine their pay calculations along with call-out fees, bank holiday payments and other additional costs across each of the organisation’s 274 stations in Scotland. All tracking, updating, and verification of crew data was manual – a time-consuming and frustrating process. Each year, station managers, watch managers and payroll teams spent over 10,000 hours handling more than 3,000 spreadsheets.
SFRS worked with Nintex digital transformation partner Synergi to design and build a new timesheet and payroll system for its RDS staff using Nintex for Office 365.
“The Nintex-based solution fits with our modern desktop strategic plan by enabling quick adoption of mobile cloud-based technologies,” said Stuart Chalmers, manager of ICT business services at SFRS.
The solution is a mobile app that allows watch managers and officers to quickly record hours for crews attending an incident and add remote crews as needed. Nintex workflows then support the entire RDS timesheet process, including validating all data captured against the internal systems; routing details to the RDS crew for approval/amendment; updating RDS crew on expected monthly pay; providing full visibility into the calculations and final outputs for approval; and connecting with payroll data to accurately calculate pay.
Since going live in 2018, the system has saved more than 10,000 manual hours, freeing station and payroll managers from tedious Excel data manipulation. It has reduced human errors and inaccuracies in payroll calculations and has improved visibility and employee experience for RDS staff.
“Our firefighters are overwhelmingly positive about the solution because it is very intuitive, saves them precious time and allows them to be paid correctly and on time,” said Chalmers. “With Nintex, SFRS staff spend less time on timesheet and payroll processes, giving them more time for their core mission.”
This article was originally published in the Winter 2019 issue of The Record. Subscribe for FREE here to get the next issues delivered directly to your inbox.