North Wales Police are implementing Open Options Employee management solution as part of a pioneering initiative to install a fully integrated world-class IT system that will allow Officers to operate effectively away from the station and hence reassure the public through high visibility and accessible policing.
Policing a large geographical area, which is home to over 650,000 people, can prove to be challenging.
With large rural areas including Snowdonia National Park and other tourist areas as well as busy towns and cities, the region requires specific types of policing support and hence the Police Force need to ensure they have the right people with the right skills at the right place at the right time.
North Wales Police set up a review project, Aquarius, to look at working practices and to seek ways of making improvements through the implementation of leading edge IT systems that would support the five crucial elements of the policing policy.
These being:
- Reassuring the public through high visibility policing.
- Responding to incidents safely and professionally and being supported by specialist policing skills.
- Making officers more accessible to the public.
- Engaging Criminality through a targeted and intelligence led approach.
- Ensuring the Corporate Health of the organisation.
Aquarius recommended the introduction of a number of systems that would enable the Force to provide a better service to the public and at the same time hit the Governments target of 3% efficiency savings that could then be re-invested into frontline policing. Within the next few years North Wales Police will see the introduction of a sophisticated Command and Control system, a new Record Management System, Mobile Data Tablets that will provide data access to officers in vehicles and on foot and a new Duty Management System.
Co-ordinated by the Operational Support Division, one of five divisions that make up the North Wales Police Force, the Aquarius project, headed by Acting Superintendent Ruth Purdie, is now under way. Critical to the projects success is the implementation of a world beating Duty Management System that will allow the Force to manage the officers and administrators effectively. Although considerable work had been done to improve employee management there were a variety of manual systems in use that were open to abuse and didn’t provide an accurate method to manage Working Time Regulations.
In addition rosters were planned centrally by 8 Sergeants using cumbersome spreadsheets and paper based systems that didn’t offer the flexibility required in service where changes have to be made rapidly to cover for shift change requests, court attendances and emergencies
