Covering an area of 2,400 square miles  

Estimated population of 678,461 people 

Almost 1,000 staff 

44 fire stations 

Product: ITSM  

Customer since: 2002 

What North Wales Fire & Rescue were looking to achieve: 

Technology is mission-critical to the service’s role, from the alerters (pagers) used to call retained firefighters to incidents, through control room systems to the mobile data terminals on appliances. The six strong IT support team is therefore crucial to the organisation’s success, handling thousands of calls per year. It operates 9-5 with call-out cover for emergencies.  

“We rely on a lot of bespoke systems, which means service management has to be efficient and effective to ensure we are delivering on the frontline,” says Steve Morris, Head of ICT at North Wales Fire and Rescue Service. “We also need to support a wide range of service requests from both front line and back-office staff all of whom have essential roles in keeping the Service running successfully.” 

How Sunrise helped them achieve this: 

The emergency services increasingly rely on technology to support frontline teams and safeguard lives and property. Thanks to Sunrise, North Wales Fire & Rescue Service has upgraded service management to eliminate paper-based processes, improve the user experience and to introduce a self-service portal that is increasingly becoming a one-stop shop for information from across the organisation, all contributing to frontline effectiveness. 

“The self-service portal was a first step in driving change in our approach and was successful in moving our end-users away from the phone. What really accelerated our progress was bringing in new skills and approaches to the team,” adds Steve.  

Implementing Sunrise has provided them with a platform for other departments to reach employees through the self-service portal. As well as IT-specific content, this includes training videos from the corporate communications team to make it easier to share knowledge, and to reduce the need for trainers to travel large distances to deliver courses. 

Future plans could see further expansion. As well as potentially adding HR forms, the data protection team is evaluating switching to Sunrise to record and monitor incoming Freedom of Information requests. This would enable previously manual steps to be automated, with in-built SLAs ensuring response times are met, as well as providing a full audit trail. “Our utopian dream is to become a portal for everyone as more departments come on board,” adds Louisa. “As part of this we’re looking at making self-service available securely outside our network – with a large number of retained firefighters who are rarely in a station this will make it easier for them to make contact and find the information they need.” 

“Sunrise is incredibly easy to customise, and talking to our account manager and other customers at user groups has really inspired us and opened our eyes to what can be done with the platform,” explains Steve. “For example, Sunrise showed us how to turn our prehistoric paper forms into electronic ones, with a proper workflow to notify relevant people when they need to grant permissions, which has made a significant difference to the way we work. What I love about Sunrise is that it is so flexible and user friendly – and that the team there want us to do the best we can with the product. Together we’ve come a long way – but can see the potential to keep adding new services to drive even greater improvements going forward.”