Case Study: Essex County Fire & Rescue Service achieves 10% fewer support calls and streamlined change management with Cherwell Software

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service - Customer Case Study

Essex County Fire & Rescue Service is one of the UK’s largest fire services, covering 1,338 square miles and serving 1.7 million people with over a thousand firefighters plus around 300 control and support staff. Its 28‑person ICT team and 15 HR staff needed more reliable, efficient backend systems to support critical operations, reduce support calls, and introduce disciplined change control across a complex, high‑risk environment.

The service refreshed its deployment of Cherwell’s ITSM platform, reverting to an out‑of‑the‑box approach to enable clean updates and new functionality. Key outcomes include a new self‑service portal (cutting support calls by about 9–10% and shifting 10% of tickets to the portal), a much tighter change‑management process now extended to suppliers, and alignment of IT and HR on a single platform. Essex also has an extensive roadmap—knowledge base and automation, mobile access, reporting dashboards, and future AI/ML initiatives—to further reduce tickets (from ~2,500 monthly toward a 1,700 target) and improve operational visibility.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service

Martin Chester

Service Delivery Manager