Law enforcement agencies need to modernize technology by replacing legacy, end-of-life systems and digitize paper-based processes. They need officers on the streets to protect their community, not manually completing complex paperwork. Unfortunately, agency staff is just as busy with the growing need to do more work with less resources – and fast.
Westminster Colorado Police Department (PD) prepared to move from their legacy Records Management System (RMS), iLeads, to Central Square’s Inform. The user experience and data integrity are always a priority when migrating to a new system. With that in mind, the PD decided they would take a day forward approach and leverage the new records management system for new cases only. However, the PD still needed to archive old case data and retire the legacy system.
The City uses Laserfiche for document management and business process automation. As a result, the PD leveraged this current solution investment to support case document archival. To migrate data from iLeads to Laserfiche, a simple data conversion using database lookups and the Laserfiche API was not feasible. iLeads was an outdated, closed 32-bit system. Traditional means of data migration were not available because of the complex data translation that needed to occur.
iLeads allows users to create a PDF of the police report directly from a case. This PDF format is ideal for archiving these legacy cases but is only available through the front-end user interface. Since an end-user click is required and they had 358,105 cases to migrate, this manual, human-dependent process would take at least a year to complete. One thing is for sure, manual was not an option!
Westminster consulted with us for recommendations to solve this issue. Our team recommended robotic process automation (RPA) to function as the human-action.
A digital worker (software bot) is the perfect solution to complete high-volume, repetitive tasks.
In this case, the digital worker equipped only with a case number and access to the legacy RMS can navigate the platform, drill down to the record, generate the PDF case report, and bring the case report and case attachment files into the archival system of record, Laserfiche. The best part? Digital workers don’t require rest, food, sick time, or vacation days!
What could’ve taken over a year to complete the data migration by hand took only 13 weeks with RPA!
Learn more about how to plan for sunsetting a legacy system by visiting Security Intelligence’s blog, “Legacy Systems: Seven Things to Know When Sunsetting.”
“The department is incredibly thankful for the amount of searchable information that we retained while implementing a new RMS and maintaining records with the required retention schedules.”
– Veronica Lopez, records technician for Westminster Police Department
Data migration for end-of-life applications is an excellent one-time use case for implementing RPA in your organization.
It’s just the beginning; whether your manual process needs are project-based or continuous repetitive processes, digital workers can do the work for you, even while you sleep, freeing your talented team to take on more strategic work.
“I found my niche! These technologies energize me to find more use cases in our agency. I have the Laserfiche and Blue Prism bug. I am truly passionate about this technology.”
Learn more about robotics process automation (RPA) and free your team from manual business processes.
