Strathclyde Fire Brigade
Strathclyde Fire Brigade (SFB) is the biggest fire brigade in Scotland responsible for providing emergency services throughout a highly populated and commercialised area of Scotland.
Operating and carrying out such vital services means that as an organisation its operational structures and procedures have to be the best available in the market place today. TWD (UK) in conjunction with one of its partners was offered the opportunity by SFB to provide a digital solution that could securely hold and host fire accident reports.
Traditionally, the SFB had archived these reports on a 16inch spools of reeled film, an expensive and laborious process both in terms of creating the film reels and in maintaining the outdated film equipment.
To overcome these problems, the SFB decided to Implement a modern electronic document management system based on the ‘Alchemy’ product suite.
Over 300 reels containing 100s of thousands of fire accident reports were converted and transferred into a bespoke Alchemy database.
Original film images that did not need to be retained for legislative reasons were confidentially disposed of after the SFB had quality checked the scanned images and approved the films destruction.
SFB staffs are now able to search for and retrieve Images in just a few seconds – the area of the organisation concerned required information from the archive regularly. After the implementation of the document management system the response time was reduced substantially increasing efficiency and response time and providing a saving of valuable staff resources which were utilised in other internal area’s reducing other operational costs and further increasing production and quality of service.
From a technology perspective, the Alchemy product suite sits comfortably within the SFB existing strategies for IT. The repository and all the user interfaces to it reside on standard PCs, linked by the SFB network. The scanned images were written to CD media, then returned to SFB to be incorporated into there user systems..
One of the project advantages was that the system was easy to role out and gave no performance issues to the existing network infrastructure as the images are compressed. Additionally, the system requires minimum housekeeping and has been found to be totally reliable.
