Case Study: West Midlands Fire Service achieves cost savings and enhanced operational safety with Ordnance Survey mapping

West Midlands Fire Service - Customer Case Study

West Midlands Fire Service was challenged by its Chief Fire Officer to “do more with less” while moving into new headquarters and needing easy-to-use mapping for incident command. To meet this challenge they adopted Ordnance Survey mapping — including OS OpenData™ and datasets available through the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) — alongside a new command-and-control approach to reduce licensing overheads and make mapping accessible to non-technical users and mobile crews.

Working with Ordnance Survey data, the service built an integrated, open-source solution: a universal loader called “Chimp” and a web-based GUI called “Vega” that uses OS VectorMap, MasterMap, AddressBase Premium and other OS layers. The Ordnance Survey-based solution delivered measurable savings on licensing, created a one-stop mapping hub scalable across the organisation with minimal training, removed per-user fees, enabled live mobile command-centre mapping, and improved operational decision-making and targeted risk activity.

West Midlands Fire Service

Marc Hudson

Watch Commander