The Background
A typical requirement within the fire service is to book rooms or areas in a fire station, headquarters or other for varied purposes including training, meetings, and community events. These bookings may be made by staff and external people, including the police, who share their headquarters with the fire service.
In the case of this fire service, the bookings for each site were managed locally using spreadsheets and calendar entries. There was no central view of bookings or availability of locations across the service and any no-shows would mean a space remaining unavailable when it could be rebooked by someone else.
Alongside the booking of spaces, there may also need to be a risk assessment completed. For example, if an external organisation wanted to use a fire station for a community event, that would require a risk assessment but an internal booking for a meeting room would not need one.
As you might imagine, the decentralised nature of the booking process, the potential requirements for risk assessments and the general management of bookings resulted in a very manual, inefficient, disjointed, and largely uncontrollable process.
Since this fire service is in the course of digitising many processes using the Microsoft Power Platform, this site bookings process was seen as one that would deliver a major benefit across the organisation, and we were asked to create a solution as part of our ongoing service contract.
