Staffordshire Police has avoided spending around
£300,000 by developing vital components of a mobile computing
system in-house.
It made the savings in adapting existing browser access to
police computers as it rolled out the first phase of a project
which will allow officers on patrol to cut time spent doing
paperwork by 10%.
The new system will give the force’s officers the ability to
access the Police National Computer and Crime Reporting network
from foot or car patrols via handheld machines and a GPRS
network.
Police officers are required to fill in six or seven sheets of
forms and have to go back to the station to do so. About half of
their time is spent in the station rather than on the street - the
new system will reduce this by about a tenth.
The solution comprises Panasonic Toughbooks, Citric client and
server software delivering handheld-friendly versions of existing
Police National Computer and Crime Reporting browsers over an
Orange GPRS network.
The force’s IT department saved money by adapting the existing
browsers in-house.
Ian de Soyza, project manager for Staffordshire Police, said,
"We cut down the Police National Computer and Crime Reporting
browsers using an HTML and Java layer to deliver data fields to the
Toughbooks. If we had had to develop all new bespoke software for
this it would have cost several hundred thousand pounds. In fact,
one supplier put in a bid of £300,000 to do the work. We did it for
£30,000."
The initial rollout has been to 60 officers, with a full-scale
deployment to the force’s 2,000 constables due by the end of
2004.