South Wales Fire and Rescue Service, based in Pontyclun near Cardiff, was looking to streamline the processing of its paper-based Home Fire Safety Forms. The service now uses electronic forms from Toplevel OfficeForms which have created improvements in efficiency and savings in time and costs.

Members of the public who have concerns about the fire risks in their home can request a home risk assessment, through the service's call centre. Home Fire Safety Forms, which are completed by the firefighters at the premises, are then returned to the station for processing.

An average of 3,500 forms a year are produced, and the previous paper-based method involved processing each individual form through the Community Safety Department where one person was responsible for data inputting the forms. The number of forms being sent to the Community Safety Department resulted in massive backlogs and ultimately resulted in the department employing an external company to data input the backlogged forms.

The switch to electronic forms
Since the service switched to the Toplevel electronic form in March 2005, there has been a major reduction in the time taken to process the forms.

Chris Williams, I.C.T. strategic manager, comments: “The electronic forms have proved so successful, we now have 12 other forms in use within the service, and more are planned. We are very impressed with the way Toplevel OfficeForms integrates seamlessly with our SQL datastores and allows us to re-use existing information to pre-populate the new database.”

Increased use of electronic forms
Other Toplevel electronic solutions used by the service include compensatory leave forms, annual leave forms, temporary promotion forms and retained firefighter details. Fire safety forms for large premises are also stored electronically and the details forwarded, via mobile data units, to crews responding to emergency calls. Each form has a standard format, which makes it easy and quick to perform electronic searching, updating, risk assessment and analysis.

Jane Roberts, sales director at Toplevel said: “Toplevel is delighted to be working alongside South Wales Fire and Rescue Service to help them achieve their long-term goal of transforming all their internal operational forms into intelligent electronic systems.”