Clarity has implemented a SharePoint solution for Cumbria Constabulary, which provides a high integrity workflow-based approach to manage high volumes of road traffic offence documentation.
This SharePoint solution has delivered numerous benefits:
- Increased efficiency of data entry from a high volume of paper documents into police line of business systems.
- Management visibility of the overall case management process and of individual staff performance.
- Increasing data integrity and support for legal admissibility and evidential weight standards that apply to electronic case files used in criminal courts.
The solution provides a highly automated process:
- Documents are scanned on receipt and metadata is captured automatically
- Digital images are stored immediately in SharePoint against their corresponding case reference.
- Appropriate workflows are triggered automatically, depending on the type of document scanned.
- Each workflow is made available to a specific group of users.
The primary purpose of each SharePoint workflow is to control and help manage a user’s workload. With an effective permissions strategy this approach provides a personalised interface for each individual user.
Managers can bulk assign multiple tasks to each user, or a user can claim an individual task. Users can see all of the tasks in the task lists they have access to, or can filter them to see ‘My Tasks’, ‘Overdue Tasks’ or ‘Unassigned Tasks’. Once the user has dealt with the content of the document (recording it in the national police system and/or providing a written response), they close the task and proceed with the next task.
Using this process means that the users no longer have to handle paper, which is scanned in a mail room, they can just key from image. This eliminates errors attributable to paper handling and increases data integrity.
Users can escalate tasks to a manager should more complicated decisions need to be made, or route tasks to another groups of users should a document have been wrongly categorised during the scanning process.
The history of each document and each workflow is maintained to provide a complete audit trail, fully in compliance with legal admissibility standards.
Each case file is stored as a document set, which is searchable via the case file reference. This allows fast and efficient retrieval of the documents when dealing with client phone calls and correspondence. Documents are instantly available once they have been scanned and the progress of an individual document can be ascertained immediately.
A management dashboard has also been implemented which allows managers to view overall performance data such as:
- Number of each type of document scanned
- The average time a document takes to process once scanned
- How many documents are currently overdue (have taken longer than a week to process)
- How many documents were escalated to management
Clarity’s SharePoint solution also provides statistics to managers on individual users’ performance. Comparisons can be made between users and training needs identified.
Due to the substantial volumes of documents the application manages, a process was put in place that automatically archives all documents in a Case File (Document Set). Workflows are an integral factor within the system’s archiving process and fundamentally control how out-of-date data is migrated from the live system into the appropriate archiving directories.
Clarity initially deployed our solution in a SharePoint 2010 environment. However we were aware that Cumbria Constabulary would upgrade to SP 2013 in the near future, so it was implemented in such a way that it would continue to work on SP2013. Cumbria recently upgraded to SP2013 and the solution continued to work without issue.
