Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Service: Availability Management, Rostering & Payroll System

Oxfordshire County Council’s Fire and Rescue Service is currently collaborating with Berkshire Fire Authority and Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes Fire Authority to work towards operational alignment between the three services. In the longer term, we intend this to involve the alignment of operations related systems and software that are common requirements to the three services.

Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service currently use a Gartan Technologies solution, comprised of three ‘modules’:

• On Call Availability Management System.

This system references user-defined crewing rules against available employees and their skills / competencies to flag Fire Service resources as available, available without BA and unavailable. The status of each resource is then shared to our control room (Thames Valley Fire Control) via an interface with their Command & Control system (Capita Vision 4). Staff contracted hours / rota obligations are entered into the system to ensure contractual obligations are met. Staff can enter booking codes to; provide additional cover, book annual leave, book sick etc.

• On Call Payroll System

This system is used by all on call, day crewing and other wholetime members of staff who undertake on call duties to claim positive hours payments. It is also used to calculate standby hours. On call staff are expected to attend a drill night once a week, this system records their attendance and has the ability to run reports on attendance and catch-up drills for performance management purposes.

On a monthly basis, a payfile (XML) is exported, containing employee ID number, payment type codes and number of hours worked for each payment type code. This is then uploaded to our employee payroll system which calculates the financial value of hours worked.

• Wholetime Rostering System

This system references user-defined crewing rules for Officer rotas and Wholetime firefighters based on their local rota patterns.

User accounts (including support staff and administrators):

• On Call Availability Management System.

<600

• On Call Payroll System

<600

• Wholetime Rostering System

<270

OFRS’ ICT infrastructure and support is supplied by OCC. OCC ICT have added their requirements to the ITT specification checklist and ICT representatives will advise during the bidder evaluation process.

OFRS currently host their AMS application locally and the associated database is stored in the OCC datacentre. We are open to cloud-based solutions and would appreciate bidder provision of pricing schedules for both locally-hosted and cloud-based solutions (if both are possible).