Dyfed Powys Police Commends Collaborative Approach

Dyfed  Powys Communication Centre deals with over 50,000 calls to the police every month. The facility provides a 24-hour response service from trained emergency call staff, including incident control personnel, responsible for dispatching and deploying police throughout the local area.

Over the past few years Dyfed Powys has undergone twenty percent year on year budget cuts. Faced with such financial pressures, the Force had to make efficiency savings across the board. Critical areas, including the emergency control room, were not exempt, and in order to ensure the service operated at optimum levels, the Force needed to find a more resilient platform that would guarantee high-availability communications for the emergency services.

The project demanded that a robust, technically proficient yet measurably cost-effective solution be sourced, built and implemented within a challenging time-frame. Even though capital investment was required to make this happen, Dyfed- Powys Police (DPP) knew it needed to proceed swiftly with the upgrade work to prevent any risk to the reputation of its emergency services’ capabilities.

Dyfed-Powys’ IT department has always had a hands-on approach to the technology behind the scenes. They work closely with their suppliers to design the optimum bespoke communications solution for their needs.  A first of its kind for all concerned, the project required intense co-operation to ensure no stone was left unturned in a bid to implement the best solution possible. The IT department also decided to involve the control room operators - as the biggest stakeholders in the system’s practical application, their input was vital to the new system’s smooth implementation. Such close collaboration was critical in helping to achieve the desired final result.

An upgrade to the telephony system to update the existing analogue PBX (Private Branch eXchange) system to a modern IP telephony platform was required.  APD Communications and Cisco have been Dyfed’s Control Room ICCS and telephony platform providers for several years, and DPP already had a significant investment in Cisco IP Telephony. Following a competitive bidding process, managed communications specialists, Kcom, was also brought in to help support this project.

APD worked with the other communications providers to integrate APD’s CORTEX ICCS and Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) with full support for Cisco’s ACD (Automatic Caller Distribution) solution, ensuring 999 calls are routed to skilled operators as quickly as possible.

The resulting solution enhances the ICCS and greatly improves the resilience and intelligent routing of emergency and non-emergency calls; all of which are essential to achieve the Force’s planned call handling resilience and efficiency gains. Operators can view accurate real-time information, handling sub-second refresh rates which ensures the large number of calls received are handled efficiently and allowing for speedy transfer of information between operators and response teams.

APD’s CORTEX ICCS is totally software based, creating a clear differential between APD and its competitors. The inherently resilient distributed architecture of CORTEX has enabled APD to design an integration with Cisco that makes CORTEX the only ICCS in the world to be officially approved by CISCO’s stringent A2Q (Acceptance to Quality) assessors to handle emergency calls via a Cisco telephony platform.
The new system was successfully installed within the deadline. All calls now come into the control room through the new communications system, supplying a highly efficient and resilient emergency service for the citizens of Dyfed in the process.

“Dyfed Powys Police serves over half of Wales, meaning we have a high volume of calls and strict SLAs to answer them in time. So we have to have a highly resilient and efficient 999 call handling service,” said Mark Hall, IS & T Networks Manager at Dyfed Powys. “Working alongside APD makes this type of upgrade easy; we have the same work ethic and the project has been carried out smoothly and with very little disruption to the day to day running of the control room. Dyfed Powys Police will benefit from greater functionality, as well as increased resilience and efficiency - thus significantly enhancing the service offered to the public.”

Jonathan Hamill, Sales & Marketing Director at APD Communications commented: “APD has enjoyed a long and privileged relationship with the emergency services within the UK and in particular with Dyfed Powys Police.  Our strategic alliance with Cisco enables us jointly to deliver best in breed emergency contact centre solutions and further positions APD as a market leader.  Police finances are under pressure and the requirement exists for increased resilience and efficient working practice and we are delighted to be in a position to respond to deliver this groundbreaking solution to Dyfed Powys Police and the community it serves.”

Elizabeth Bramwell, Sales Director at Kcom, commented: “Our experience gained by providing services to over 40 per cent of the UK’s police forces, gives us extensive knowledge of what customers in this space want. We worked closely with APD and Cisco to install a solution which has incredibly high resilience with no likelihood of lost calls, the first of its kind in the world.”

Source: APD