Bringing Collaboration Efficiency to Modernize Police Workforce Operations

This article is sponsored by Dassault Systèmes.

Police workforces in the Asia Pacific region typically work with stretched schedules and manpower. They are also required to reorder their operational plans on short notice over quickly developing challenges. Then there is pressure on governments to spend public money with more efficiency leading to budget cuts for policing. At the level of the government, police authorities and employees, there is increasing concern with data security and with the question of who ultimately owns the data collected and used by police forces.

Police workforce planning has specific challenges. Not only do senior police officers need to forecast capacity requirements accurately to manage recruitment needs, they also need to factor population growth and future population density into their calculations for capacity planning and coverage.

Ensuring high availability of the police force with matching labor requirements and skills requirements is essential to smooth operations. Employee satisfaction and work-life balance are key to maintaining a healthy and motivated police force. This means they require systems to manage fatigue and psychological risks especially from post-traumatic events.

Shared assets such as vehicles and tasers need to be managed efficiently and productively. Not only administrators, but individual officers need deep visibility into changes to assignments. At the same time, community engagement is key to ensuring the best law and order coverage in large cities. This also involves smooth management of community events such as political rallies and music festivals from law and order and citizen satisfaction perspectives.

Recent events call for dynamic workforce solutions

Recent years have also taught us that police forces being prepared for traumatic and disruptive events at the national or regional level is crucial to national well-being. Being prepared to act upon exigencies such as pandemics and accidents quickly and efficiently is crucial to the well-being of the police workforce as well.  This entails a high level of detailed planning and readiness to tackle pandemic situations or natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods.

There is the predominance of piecemeal solutions in policing operations that tackle bits and pieces of different challenges. This leads to a lack of consolidated view, seamless collaboration as well as data-enabled decision making that are essential to overcome the critical situations that officers and administrators face every single day.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform transforms collaboration

Dassault Systèmes virtual workforce solutions for Business Services and Cities & Public Services industries use the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to transform public administration by ensuring seamless and efficient collaboration. Police forces can plan forthcoming months and weeks ahead of time and ensure predictability with capacity modeling capabilities.

For example, with the Planning & Optimization solution, they can optimize the workforce and shifts required to cover the areas under their control as well as rationalize the roles involved. Moreover they can also optimize the required roles within particular shifts.

Master roster control helps administrators optimize the number of police personnel required to cover each shift. Moreover it becomes easier to enforce rules and policies within the workforce with the platform. To ensure employee well-being administrators can maximize preferences common to all personnel when they create the roster. Constraints and KPI-based planning and optimization ensures visibility into the quality of the output of the produced rosters and the shifts.

Leave planning can be done in such a way that administrators can plan all statutory leaves while best covering personnel requirements. Roster assignments can be handed out in such a way that known personnel requirements and fair distribution of work among personnel is always guaranteed. As a measure to improve employee satisfaction and to maintain a high morale among the forces, the platform also supports preferences for shifts, shift swapping and self-rostering while retaining management control.

From long term to day of operations integrated on one platform

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform also helps plan operations weeks and days ahead as well as throughout the day of operations. Personnel assignments are always continuously monitored and optimized, and disruptions and unforeseen events are tackled in an easier manner, while unplanned absences are also quickly mitigated using the platform. In tricky situations that can stretch operational limits and workforce deployment, administrators can model and identify alternative adjustments and choose the right balance between preserving service quality and minimizing the number of affected staff.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform helps to integrate all levels right from long term planning across years with mid-term planning across months, operational planning across weeks and days and execution in days and hours in one unified model.

Dassault Systèmes Workforce Planning and Optimization solution provides a seamless, unified user experience and ease of use with up-to-date data, AI-based algorithms and embedded analytics on a single platform for all stakeholders. Moreover with the intelligence and experience of hundreds of successful deployments built into the system, the solution is easy to deploy and get police workforce operations ready for end-to-end digital transformation at the earliest.

Users can plan resource utilization across service units such as patrol and traffic management and across planning levels with Dassault Systèmes Workplace Planning & Optimization solution. The integrated solution provides all planning decisions on a unified platform and also provides scalability for complete business resource planning. Police organizations can improve employee efficiency based on the latest demand inputs with advanced decision support using AI-powered optimization algorithms.

Outcomes based on real value delivery

Ultimately with the solution police forces can reduce overcapacity and under capacity, model and compare what-if scenarios and control demand management for best outcomes according to skill or role. They can also reduce over time, improve utilization, and ensure high morale and employee satisfaction by factoring in employee needs into the planning process.

Community engagement and public satisfaction with police services are maintained at a high level. The Dassault Systèmes Workplace Planning & Optimization solution is a unique solution built for complex workforce planning of its kind that can cover all union, labor and organizational rules with all their peculiarities.

Planners can quickly visualize their best options through data-driven visualization and seamless collaboration and integration. AI-powered algorithms optimize employee productivity, service delivery, satisfaction, and safety while all events and decisions are propagated in real time across the entire system and to all stakeholders. Dassault Systèmes provides a single integrated solution across the value chain and all time horizons to meet all the requirements for a modern police force’s wellbeing and maintaining national law and order.