Barrie Police Service

The Customer 

The Barrie Police Service is located on the western shores of Lake Simcoe in Ontario, Canada. Established in 1853, today it is a thriving agency composed of 238 sworn police officers and 109 full-time civilian members. As the second-oldest police service in the region, Barrie Police officers have experienced many changes over the last century and a half, but throughout their history one thing has remained constant: they are committed to providing accountable, responsive and cost-efficient policing services to the community, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. 

The Challenge

From patrolling on foot, to having only one patrol car with no radio, to using strategically placed red lights downtown as alerts, Barrie Police Service has evolved from a county constable into a modern, proactive police organisation. It has always made strides to improve its front-line services through technology, something many in the public safety sector have traditionally been slow to adopt. 

The Barrie Police Service recognises the value of investing in technological solutions to create efficiencies. Our community is growing, and we need to balance fiscal responsibility with operational requirements. The Microsoft Power Platform allowed our Service to not only increase officer productivity, but it was also easy to use, and allows for more apps to be developed in the future.

When their officer reporting solution became outdated and unsupported, the Service was determined to replace it with a modern mobile application that would increase efficiency and better support officers as they work on the road. After significant research, Barrie found that Microsoft Power Apps was the best and most cost-effective solution for their needs. 

When we learned InfoPath was being deprecated, our main goal was to find a solution that would keep officers on the road. But we also had other asks, it had to be available at any time and from anywhere and improve our data quality. When we realised Power Apps hit 99 percent of what we wanted, we decided to give it a try.

While they already had Power Platform licences in place from their Microsoft 365 investment, Barrie Police did not have the in-house know-how around low-code/no-code application development tools or cloud technology. They needed guidance in designing and building a scalable solution, training app makers and users, and establishing security and governance, which is why they engaged Hitachi Solutions. 

The Solution

Hitachi Solutions demonstrated its industry knowledge and mastery of the Microsoft Power Platform during a workshop attended by Barrie Police. After the workshop, Barrie Police determined that Hitachi Solutions‘ Rapid Solution Development (RSD) tech hub of Power Platform experts was exactly what they needed to gain the advisory services, up-skilling and hands-on help to accelerate and successfully complete the project. Working collaboratively, the teams strategised, planned and designed a custom MVP Power Apps pilot, tested it with a small group, enhanced it based on feedback, and then rolled the report management solution out to officers for wider use. 

The new solution was dubbed MORA (Maria’s Officer Reporting App), named after Barrie Police Information System Analyst Maria McWilliams, who was instrumental in championing the project and creating the easy-to-use app that automates, streamlines and digitises reporting for officers, allowing them to efficiently log live reports from the field using their smartphones. 

Before, officers had to come back to the station to enter report data. This meant they spent less time on the road. Now, they can use the app right on their phones or the computers in their cars. It’s mobile, on-the-go, and can be used more efficiently to start, complete, and even submit reports.

Top features of MORA include: 

• Report categories available from drop-down menus, pre-populated with standard narratives, so instead of typing everything in every time it is auto-filled and officers just make the appropriate changes to customise it 
• Dictation capabilities on officers‘ smartphones 
• Seamless use across multiple platforms, connected via the cloud, so officers can start reports on their phones and complete and submit them on a computer at the station or in their cars 
• Information entered only once and then accessible by data entry personnel and other units, saving time and effort and reducing errors 
• Reports that are more accurate, complete and processed faster, making them available to officers, the courts and the public sooner 
• Automated workflows for change requests, reviews and approvals, with complete visibility of report status and automatic email notifications throughout 
• A connection to Microsoft Dataverse, so all the data is consumed by Microsoft Power BI for advanced analytics and reporting, giving Barrie Police valuable insight into occurrence statistics so they can be more proactive, effective and responsive 

Why Hitachi Solutions

Barrie Police already had the Power Platform licences but not the in-house low-code or cloud expertise. Hitachi Solutions‘ Rapid Solution Development hub provided the advisory services, up-skilling and hands-on build help they needed, along with the security and governance to do it safely, delivering a scalable solution and leaving the team able to build more apps themselves. 

The Benefits 

The MORA app saves Barrie Police officers time spent on paperwork, increases their efficiency, productivity and agility on the road, and reduces report approvals to just hours. Other benefits include: 

• Modernises, streamlines and simplifies incident reporting 
• Reduces the time and effort required for officers to write, complete and submit reports 
• Provides complete and accurate reports, improving quality and speeding the approval process 
• Increases data quality, visibility and access, which improves operations, reporting and services 
• Integrates with Power BI to provide real-time data analytics and insights that help identify incident trends 

The new app is easy to learn and use, taking officers about 10 minutes to get the hang of it. While at first there was a little bit of resistance, once they realised how easy it was and saw the functionality and benefits, they loved it. Members in the Records Unit, and other personnel, also love it because of the improved quality of the reports, data, and tracking capabilities.

What’s Next? 

Through this engagement, Hitachi Solutions helped Barrie Police gain valuable skills and knowledge around Microsoft Power Platform and citizen development. Now anyone on their team can make feature enhancements to MORA, as well as build new apps for modernising other processes in the future. 

Our knowledge management officer has developed an app to help investigators with canvassing activities, we’ve created an app to track equipment maintenance, and the finance department has built an app for inputting expenses. We are also looking for other paper-based forms to digitise and we want to automate document creation with all the data we are collecting.