January 2008
The New Year Brings a New Staff Wizard®
As you may know, Corona Solutions has announced the release of the latest version of Staff Wizard 2008 is in Beta testing. This is a complete rewrite of the software which has been assisting law enforcement agencies with their staffing/scheduling analysis and roster building since 1995. Staff Wizard 2008 is packed with new features and a redesigned interface inspired by customer feedback and new advances in technology. Learn more
Welcome to Corona Solutions
New Customers
- Springfield, MO
- Wheat Ridge, CO
- Fresno, CA
- Fond Du Lac, WI
- El Monte, CA
- Sioux Falls, SD
- Durham Regional Police, ON
- Superior, WI
- Sugar Land, TX
- Plano, TX
- Arlington, TX
- Milwaukee, WI
What's New in CADmine
In response to customer requests, CADmine reports can now be run from either ALL or FAVORITES. This allows for easier access for sampling of new reports.
Innovative Uses of CADmine
GREEN BAY, WI - Green Bay Police Department is allowing citizens and business owners to subscribe to CADmine™ to receive alerts for personal or business addresses for $10. The property owner receives an e-mail alert generated from CADmine if there is an incident at their property. To date, they have more than 300 users signed up.
SAN JOSE, CA - San Jose Police department used CADmine to successfully locate a homeless person who was witness to a homicide. A Sergeant, looking for the witness, was getting ready to do a methodical search to locate this man. he received training for CADmine a day before his search and created an alert for this person by keyword. As a result, the Sergeant located this person within 24 hours.
GLENDALE, AZ - Glendale, AZ is using the alert function in CADmine to produce e-mails to landlords when there is an incident at their properties. The alerts exclude certain sensitive call types that may contain any information that might be protected. As a result, Glendale became the first Arizona agency to receive an award for implementing an e-mail based property notification system for Arizona's crime-free multi-housing program.
Technology
Corona Solutions strives to continue delivering the latest technology solutions for law enforcement agencies. At the end of 2007 we completed a major hardware upgrade to accommodate the growing need for storage and security of your data. If you have technical questions at any time please contact support@coronasolutions.com, 888.450.9887.
Congratulations
To our partner firm, Strategic Direction of the UK for completing a major analysis for the Toronto Police Service in Canada using Staff Wizard. This is a very large agency and a very large project, now successfully completed.
The Big Two
Put most simply, Corona Solutions' Staff Wizard helps you answer two questions:
1. How many patrol officers do I need?
2. What is the best deployment for the number of officers I expect to have?
Though the questions are simple, answers are not and the possibilities are myriad. For this issue, let's start with the first question; how many do you need? Of course, first you have to define your need. Do you need to arrive at your emergency calls within a certain average amount of time? Do you need to need to protect a certain portion of each officer's time for proactive policing? Do you have administrative minimum staffing levels? Do you have labor agreements that constrain your ability to modify staffing levels and schedules? All of these come into play in answering this question, and we have not even addressed workload!
Let's take a common operational goal, response time to emergencies, and discuss how it works in Staff Wizard. First, we will look at the total projected workload, broken down by the time blocks. Of course we will consider all of the Input Statistics, such as land area, response speeds, and service time per unit per call. We now want to calculate how many units are needed to have enough to respond to all emercency calls within 6 minutes on average. Response time, by the way, is calculated from the beginning of the call to the first unit arrival.
Staff Wizard 2008 has a new feature that allows you to calculate not only by the number of units to achieve an average (mean) projected response time, but also to calculate a quantile response time. That simply means that instead of, or in addition to, being concerned about the average response time, you want to arrive at a certain percentage of your calls within a set amount of time. One common goal is to arrive at 90% of the emergency calls within 15 minutes, for example. As the percentage goal gets closer to 100%, then either the time or the required amount of units required goes up dramatically. Of course staffing at those levels results in large amounts of time available for proactive work, but is also very expensive.
Using the Staff Wizard Operational Goals function, we then calculate the number of units needed to be on duty during each hour to meet all of our operational goals. In most agencies, that number will vary significantly between busy periods and slower periods. Emergency Response Time is only one of ten classes of operational goals, most with multiple permutations, and all capable of being calculated for every fifteen minutes in a week. You can run any combination as many times as you like, with Staff Wizard telling you how many units are needed for each goal, each period, and in total. If the agency has a completely flexible schedule, then can just take the total from Staff Wizard, consider the Availability Factor, and hire that many officers. However, police agencies do not work that way. Officers need a scheule of shifts, and that is where the Scheduler module comes in, which we will cover with the answer to Question 2 in the next issue.
In History
1893 - The first national police group is formed, the National Chiefs of Police Union. It would later become the International Association of Chiefs of Police. For the first time, police leaders met regularly to share ideas.
1902 - Fingerprinting is first used in the United States by law enforcement.
1914 - The Berkeley (CA) Police Department becomes the country's first agency to have all patrol officers using automobiles.
