Environmental Agency, United Kingdom
Public Service
Disaster Response Staff
United Kingdom
Introduction
UK Environmental Agency (EA) is a special agency with funding directly sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Its mission is to deploy emergency workers during natural disasters or situations that create a public safety endangerment. Examples of such situations involve both direct impact on safety and indirect impact via contamination.
CareWare was selected over competition from several UK providers, including the SMART-Kronos alliance. The selection panel saw the flexibility in CareWare which was tailored for Hospital staff e-rostering. Having over 2000 configuration parameters neatly organized over 18 screens with each screen having multiple tables was immediately impressive. While the EA has funded several enhancements to suit emergency response, they have gladly done this due to the large stream of benefits that have accrued over the life of the contract. The initial three year contract was extended in March 2015 due to these accrued benefits.
“We needed Care Systems to do a lot of enhancements to suit our work flow and every time Care Systems delivered the new functionalities as per our requirement on time”
The fact that the CareWare suite was gladly accepted by users helped to decommission the inconsistent variety of existing tools used for rostering. The resulting consistency, with the accompanying, nation-wide visibility and instant and accurate reporting, all jointly resulted in a significant savings for the agency. The above attributes allowed for overtime reduction, fairness in dispatching that contributed to increased staff retention, location sensitive dispatching that yielded cost savings, system aided floating (inter-department movement) and swapping to further satisfy both management and staff, and the use of the powerful system-originating multi-mode communications capability. These all greatly enhanced system-wide efficiency.
The financial benefits were quite remarkable. A 5% reduction of staff was easily achieved in the 11,000 person organization using the above attributes of CareWare and was the equivalent of £19 million in savings per year. A 10% reduction of the 40 million overtime bill easily saved £4 million per year.