According to a study by Accenture, 56% of police professionals expect a greater sharing of resources and skills between agencies in the future. The public safety sector needs to be building adaptive and agile workforce management strategies now to prepare for these changes in expectations.
Doing away with spreadsheets and investing in the right workforce management system will help you get ahead. Our automated scheduling software, Indeavor, helped one of your peers do just that.
The Problem
With 8,000+ employees, 15 different union groups, and hundreds of scheduling and leave management policies scattered across paper at their 30+ locations, this agency was faced with a very difficult challenge: standardize workflows and provide agency visibility.
With a lack of proper records and controls surrounding certification and qualification management, employees who weren’t qualified for specific positions worked them for years with little oversight… resulting in a cumulation of $10 million in fines.
Every complex, 24×7 environment needs a qualification management system integrated with their automated scheduling process because it ensures that agents’ skills, certifications, and allowances are taken into account during scheduling. In crisis situations where someone needs backup, law enforcement professionals sitting at the agency may feel pressured to call up just about anyone who could be made available, whether they’re certified to help or not. With a QMS integration, agencies can search and identify the most optimal officers to call (or text) in mere minutes based on specific skills certifications.
With hundreds of different paper processes being the backbone of their scheduling operation, such employee information was disjointed and made it harder to get qualified people on the job. Besides the enforcement of certification compliance, the agency was struggling with other bottlenecks like:
- Overtime overruns
- Lack of scheduling transparency
- Manual entry payroll errors
Limited technology played a part in each problem.
The Indeavor Solution
Indeavor partnered with management to implement an agency-wide workforce management solution. Now, schedulers automatically create both long and short-term schedules that follow operational rules and match staffing needs. There was also a much-needed QMS integration that ensured only qualified workers were assigned to each position.
Since the QMS system was implemented, the agency has not been fined once. The original fine of $10 million was also reduced to $2 million.
Curious to see how Indeavor also helped this public safety agency cut overtime costs by a staggering 97%, along with a breakdown of which other processes were standardized.
