Article Highlights
- The problem: Outdated, manual processes
- The solution: PowerPolicy can streamline policy management
- The benefits: Police departments save time and money
To effectively protect and serve their communities, law enforcement officers need to stay informed when policies and procedures are updated, and they need to be able to easily access them. A lack of understanding about the agency’s policies and procedures can not only affect officers’ ability to serve, but also expose them – and the department – to greater risk of compliance issues.
Police departments need a more efficient way of policy management besides their traditional use of paper manuals. PowerDMS’s PowerPolicy solution is one of the best law enforcement software available to help you make the transition.
The problem: Outdated, manual processes
Law enforcement agencies have to follow numerous policies, procedures, and best practices as required by their cities and counties, as well as those developed by professional agencies like the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). These policies are vital to the operations, guidance, and accountability of police departments.
Outdated processes make it hard to effectively manage these policies and procedures. This can have an impact on law enforcement staff and the community at large. In PowerDMS’s State of Policy in Law Enforcement report, we found that 93% of law enforcement agencies said policies were “very important” for ensuring officers perform properly in the field.
Manual processes are time-consuming and laborious, especially if your department still uses printed documents and 3-ring binders. You have to print out new copies of each policy any time there's an update, distribute them to all staff and hope that each employee puts the new policy in their binder. In addition, you need to find and replace all the old copies so no one accidentally references the outdated version – but with loose papers, it’s hard to keep track of them all.
You also can't be sure whether everyone has read the new policies to ensure whether your entire department is compliant with the new requirements, making it harder to avoid liability and mitigate compliance risk. This is where policy management software for law enforcement can solve your problems.
The solution: PowerPolicy by PowerDMS
PowerPolicy is policy management software for law enforcement, made specifically to help agencies streamline process workflows. For one thing, it provides a central repository to store, manage, track, and find all file types and versions. PowerPolicy’s version control feature automatically archives the old versions of policies to ensure only the most recent version of a document is available for your staff.
The software also has customizable workflow tools to help you establish consistent, automated processes. Access control gives platform administrators the ability to set user permissions for employees based on proper levels of access to critical information. Officers also receive automatic email notifications whenever a policy is updated, with a side-by-side comparison tool so they can easily pinpoint exactly what changes were made.
Furthermore, PowerPolicy’s electronic signature tracking tool lets you verify that everyone has signed off on policy changes to ensure awareness. If anyone in your department has not acknowledged the new policy, you’ll know – the software includes dashboards where you can view staff’s To-Do checklists of outstanding items and track completion statuses across departments.
Another useful feature of PowerPolicy is the mobile app, which gives employees easy access to view policies and procedures 24/7. If officers are out in the field and need to double check a procedure, they can use their tablets or mobile phones to quickly find it in the app.
The benefits of policy management software
Using PowerPolicy's document workflow automation saves police departments time and money. The streamlined system enables you to update policies four times faster than manual methods for policy management. You can also distribute new versions of policies and procedures faster than the old print-and-ship methods departments have used for decades.
On average, this can save your law enforcement agency as much as $11,000 in paper and printing costs. You can update policies electronically, post them online, and automatically notify people via email – no more printing, no more papers, no more binders, and no more interoffice mail. These benefits make PowerPolicy one of the best law enforcement software solutions in terms of efficiency and cost savings.
And perhaps more importantly, your officers will have access to mission-critical policies anytime, anywhere. With the mobile version of PowerPolicy, officers can easily and quickly access policies when it matters most. This leads to improved tracking and accountability, as well as reduced liability.
Ready to learn more?
PowerDMS offers some of the best policy management software for law enforcement, and we'd like to show you what you can do with it. From streamlining your document management workflow solutions to tracking and assessing your officers' understanding of policies and procedures, PowerPolicy can help.
Learn more by scheduling a free demo on our website.