Let’s talk about the core of your organization, about ensuring your repeatable uniqueness is captured in your organizations heartbeat: your operations, your outreach, your business process, your IT, your team leaders, your operatives and your back office need to ensure what your clients expect is what they get.

Uniqueness

Uniqueness is a key to survival, look at nature: every species has unique characteristics for gathering food and surviving, sometimes in the most extreme environments. Without it, it’s just a numbers game and you probably do not have the numbers (ie $, people) to match it with your big competitors. This uniqueness is most important on the uphill climb to size and volume.

Operational DNA

Operational DNA: Your Investigation team has it.

Every Investigation Manager we’ve met has a very clear idea how they want their operations working, who says what to whom, who does what to whom at which stage.  Lists are ticked,  repeat cycles of client updates whether, weekly or whatever are followed with consistency. Update reports are fired off with clarify, consistency and regularity to clients to keep them posted.

All good Investigation Managers also need to track their current workload and capacity and make sure the fires are stoked and running hot (but not too hot). Their unique approach to delivery and expectation management requires that their paper, people and software fit like a glove. They cannot easily bend their unique proposition to the market if their underlying systems will not bend with them. Therein lies the problem. Not all people and software are adaptable.

You’re Marines now. You adapt. You overcome. You improvise. Let’s move. Four minutes!

Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway, Heartbreak Ridge

Problems with inflexibility

What hinders your operational DNA and is it a big deal? I think so, I’ve seen it throughout my career in lots of diverse businesses:  300 year old merchant banks, elevator companies, insurers, TV stations and of course Investigation units. It’s the same story: If your operational needs cannot be easily adapted into your software you have two basic choices:

1. Hire more people, pay additional hours to manually adapt outside the software with paper, spreadsheets, unnecessary process.
2. Get your software provider to change the code to allow for your unique requirements.

Let’s drill into these a bit:

Polonious won a Silver award for BPM excellence in 2009

Solution 1 – Hire more: The problem with the first path is also a bonus for us when we encounter it. It’s common is all our new clients. The adaptations develop a life of their own, you hire people to maintain spreadsheets, paper forms, hold meetings to work out things that the system should do for you, spend hours writing special needs spreadsheets and reports for individual clients. Essentially, all the things we clean up and give back to our clients in savings when we implement our investigation management software. Software just doesn’t do your type of operation unless it’s really adaptable. You pay because of this. By the way, we know this stuff, we won an award last year for business process management in the insurance industry.

Solution 2 – Get the software changed:

OK, this is a good idea (if your software provider will do it, some adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach – go figure). We think it’s better if the software just does it in the first place. We tend to solve most of our client’s needs with simple configuration choices and selections made by our subject matter experts Alastair and Rick. There are points where we find the software does need adaptation, we bring those changes on quickly with minimal cost to our clients and make them configurable, this means our future and past clients can benefit from similar needs whilst still remaining unique in their market. As they say ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.

Some thoughts to leave you with

Richard Shepherd, our President of US Operations

You and your team are definitely unique, that’s why your clients keep coming back to you, you do the sort of work they need. Our question is this: Should you be paying a penalty for this uniqueness?

If you’d like to call Rick to discuss, he’s been involved in investigations management for more than 20 years, he knows your challenges, can quickly get up to speed on them and has some great ideas on how to solve them.

Rick Shepherd 561.515.6040

About the writer

Stuart Guthrie has loved software since his first Apple II in 1978 when he helped write a star wars game.. His clients have included OTIS Elevator, Rothschilds Investment Bank, Insurance Australia Group, British Broadcasting Corporation, Mercedes Benz, Sims Metal Australia, Production Plus, Hartford Insurance Group and many others of all sizes.

Stuart is passionate about adapting software to fit business rather than the other way around.

In 2004, Stuart partnered with Alastair Steel to form Polonious and created market-leading software for all aspects of the investigation management industry from small PI firms to large insurance and government special investigation units. Stuart believes that innovation and new techniques will drive future success for Investigation Units and Polonious are leading that charge..

We talk a lot about business process and reducing the steps and time required to produce the best investigations possible. But we are not a factory. Our customers have the best of both worlds, a proven tool set and the ability to make it what they want. It does not have to be black, it is not our way or the highway.

A perfect example of this is exhibited in our latest video produced by Horsemen Investigations Inc. where Patrick Carroll discussed how Polonious enabled him to prove something he had known for years.

With the right tools and partners you gain the ability to realize your own vision, record your own metrics, run your company the way you want to.

Patrick came to us with an idea to record the details of claimants movements, I know everyone does that, the difference is Patrick wanted it captured in detail and reported on over time and in several ways. Patrick was right. There were patterns that Horsemen Investigations Inc. could use internally to better allocate their resources and plan their surveillance. Their results improved, they achieved more with less, they have an edge over their competitors. Additionally they were able to share those results and methods with their clients.

Patrick Carroll’s insight was the spark that lit the fire, but Polonious was happy to be the flint that produced it.

Regards,

Alastair Steel,
General Manager -- Product & Sales

If you would like more information on the sorts of benefits our software offers our clients, please contact our industry expert Rick Shepherd. Before he joined Polonious, Rick was a senior executive at a nationwide Private Investigation firm. His ability to understand your business quickly will provide you with list of hard and soft savings this unique product provides. Rick’s number is 561.515.6040.

Alternatively, contact us using this form and we will respond rapidly:

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Every PI Firm we first meet that is engaged in quality surveillance operations blows a lot of dough each day updating their clients with fancy word processed version of an ‘update report on subject activity’.

This is a necessary and useful part of the process as it keeps the adjustor up to date with progress and gives the account rep the opportunity to discuss extending the investigation based on the update provided.

To do the process well using a word processor is time consuming.  Let’s say your software gets you some of the way there, how long each day do your account reps spend producing the updates? Let’s assume it’s 5 minutes per file since they’re all fast at your business. Let’s assume most reps are running 20 updates a day. So we’re looking at around 100 minutes per rep per day. That’s a lot of time. Considering most working days are a minimum of 480 minutes, your reps could be blowing as much as 20% of their time clicking, copying, pasting, dragging, dropping, tuning these reports before updating each client each day with the good news.

What our product PiMS provides is a tool that can instantly create these case updates from all the pertinent case facts (comments, notes, data, photos, etc) and the information uploaded directly from the field by the operative.

The generated case update is a neat, consistent, nicely presented PDF or DOC that can be instantly digested. Your clients will appreciate that you are not wasting their time with the update being high quality, consistent and instantly absorbed.

So what do out customers account reps do with all that spare time? Play computer games? No. Surf facebook? No.

They get more clients of course!

Our experience

We’ve known, from our industry experience, that this is a crucial part of the investigation delivery cycle and have been working hard to reduce it to a simple, fast and consistent process.

We’ve won prizes for this sort of work (see picture below) and have saved all of our 34 clients considerable time and money with technology like this.

Polonious won a Silver award for BPM excellence

This prize was awarded for business process re-engineering (a combination of Polonious software and deep understanding/improvement of how IMAN’s business processes work). The case study in question saves our client IMAN Insurance 60,000 hours of employee time per annum. This equates to $2,400,000 each year at their current workload.

Take advantage of our experience..

If you’d like to know more about what PiMS can do for you, talk to Rick, our President of US Operations. Before he joined Polonious, Rick was a senior executive at a nationwide Private Investigation firm. His ability to understand your business quickly will provide you with list of hard and soft savings this unique product provides. Rick’s number is 561.515.6040.

Alternatively, fill out our contact form, and we’ll be in touch:

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Our blog investigation-management.com regularly produces content we believe improves your capabilities in this important industry. To subscribe, click here.

Admin is a business killer -- particularly in the investigations industry. It’s a necessary evil that we all must deal with. Compliance, SLAs, reporting needs, paper signoffs, filing, reviews, requests for information, etc, all destroy chunks of your profit.

As your business grows, client complexity increases, this inevitably leads to the admin overhead eating more of your bottom line as you react by adding layers of people and steps to cover off these requirements.

Growth in inefficiency as firm expands

It’s great practice as a PI firm to regularly review and improve your methods and operations but these attempts are often thwarted by un-integrated and old information technology, lots of little subsystems in spreadsheets, email accounts and files. All you can do is add to more of the same.

“You get into a history of doing something and though the original reason for doing it has long disappeared, you continue to do it because you have always done it” Mark McCormack on Managing

The solution:

Our whole-of-business solution will streamline the whole process of running a case. The fancy term for this is ‘business process re-engineering’. For us, it’s a by-product of our software, our installation and our training. Our industry experts (both Al Steel and Rick Shepherd have 25+ years of experience in the Investigations industry) provide unique insights into how to take your business to the next level using our industry best-of-breed software solution PiMS.

In all of our 34 clients to date, this streamlining reduces several steps and saves significant administration time. The software itself is full of productivity features, for example -- we provide click-of-the-button retrieval for case reports, client updates, invoices, requests for information. Pretty much anything you can type in a word processor, we can automate. You are going to love the savings.

So the two step plan for dropping 20% of your admin costs is:
- Get the most capable software you can use for this industry (that would be PiMS)
- Get Industry veterans to implement and train you to take best advantage of it’s productivity savings. (this comes standard in our rollout plan).

The Proof:

Don’t take this from us, listen to Patrick Carroll, CEO of Horsemen Inc. a significant player in the West Coast. He will tell you how in the first year of PiMS operation, we enabled him to re-purpose 4 individuals on his team (about 8% of his team). That’s a lot of efficiency that’s produced a workforce for other parts of his operation. His client’s are also reaping the benefits of these changes and Horsemen are rewarded in kind with a bigger share of the market.

Certainly it’s made a huge difference as far as what we were doing.. you certainly don’t ever want to sit down and say an individual’s obsolete but we’ve been able to take individuals who’s job descriptions were based on our old method and that’s freed them up to do other things now. So I would say from a stand point of, “has it decreased..?” I’d say it’s probably 20, 25% decrease in the amount of administration costs we’ve seen as far as the number of people required to do our old system as opposed to now. Patrick Carroll, CEO of Horsemen Inc.

Our product and our rollout method are proven in the field to deliver real savings to small to large PI firms just like yours. 20-25% efficiency frees up your people’s time to accomplish other missions and needs such as closing more business, talking to clients to understand their challenges, improving quality of report, scheduling better. Your business cannot help but benefit from this freed up resource.

What can you do about it?

Talk to Rick, our President of US Operations. Before he joined Polonious, Rick was a senior executive at a nationwide Private Investigation firm. His ability to understand your business quickly will provide you with list of hard and soft savings this unique product provides. Rick’s number is 561.515.6040.

Alternatively, fill out our contact form, and we’ll be in touch:

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EASIER:
As easy to use as surfing the net. (Typically an investigator can be trained in four hours). See how easy here.

FASTER:
Save time on double handling of data and documents. Automated messaging saves on emails and phone calls. Report generation saves time typing the same information again and again. See how here.

MORE EFFICIENT:
Streamlined processes means fewer staff required to handle more work. You stay informed automatically and the system helps users decide what to do next. See how here.

COST EFFECTIVE:
Enterprise solution means Lite will grow with your business removing the cost of change in the future. Enterprise servers located in data exchanges ensure lightning fast response around the clock around the world.

Being successful in business is about working smarter, not harder.

PIMS Lite is your opportunity to enable your company and increase your return on investment through the use of smart technology.

Polonious delivers solutions to investigation companies, small and large, and insurance carriers across the globe, helping our clients grow and outperform their competitors.

We are a dedicated software development company with a single goal of delivering the best investigation management tool globally.

If you want to go from good to great focus on what you are good at, let us help you when it comes to IT solutions.

PIMS also becomes a powerful marketing tool for your business see the ‘Letter you can now send your clients’

Our solution ticks all the boxes for an enterprise grade solution, infrastructure, disaster recovery ability and security. We will give you and your clients peace of mind today and into the future as you grow.

To see what we have done for others here.

Contact us to see how we can help you.

Regards,
Alastair Steel,
General Manager – Product & Sales.

Dear John,

ACME Investigations are pleased to announce the introduction of our on-line investigation management solution – AIMS (Acme Investigation Management System).

With web access tailored for your requirements and exacting standards. The web access will enable you to get the most up-to-date information about your cases, seeing progress and reviewing interim reports in real time.

The web site features:

• Secure logon (protected by the best security certificates the internet has available).
• Dashboards to show you all current cases we are working for you and their status.
• Optional automated updates via text message and email when cases are updated by us.
• Interim reports available on-line (more secure than email).
• Your Quality Assurance checks with our answers  available for your review on each case.
• Final reports on-line as soon as they occur (more secure than email).
• Graphical Reports, pictures and video all available via logon.
• Beautiful, consistent daily updates and reports to you in the manner you expect.

The application is hosted off site in a highly secure facility, not in the ‘cloud’. The facilityʼs resilience is underpinned by a minimum N+1 standard for power and cooling systems, delivering an optimal operating environment to clients 24×7. System connectivity distribution via multiple 100Mpbs Ethernet connections and network architecture that ensures that no single point of failure will never affect connectivity to our application, redundant power supply systems and state of the art physical security systems.

We also have in place a disaster recovery plan that provides the following:

1. All data is backed up off site daily to servers and can be restored to a mirrored server within four hours of any critical failure or disaster.
2. Secondary servers are available in different locations to ensure natural disaster coverage and provide business continuity.
3. Data is also backed up (encrypted) to tertiary storage servers.
4. Secondary IP access can be granted in the event of network failure.

Security is a priority at ACME, the solution ensures 128-bit encryption for all activity on the internet, the same as the banks use. Our servers receive regular security updates, have intrusion detection systems in place and are regular scanned to ensure detection of rootkits.

In terms of review points with our organisation. Your client representative can now provide you monthly reviews of your cases with us. We can analyse our performance with you on turnaround times, quality, mixes of work, locations, even the times the claimants first become active. This sort of regular review will help focus our teams to give you even better service.

We know these features will make your life easier, saving you time and money over existing emails and phone calls and give you peace of mind.

We will be contacting you shortly to arrange a presentation of your current case load with ACME and to explain how this makes it even easier to run your case load through ACME in the future.

Sincerely yours,
ACME Investigations

Regards,

Alastair Steel,
General Manager – Product & Sales

—— Letter Ends ——

If you would like more information on the sorts of benefits our software offers our client’s clients (ie insurers and employers), please contact our industry expert Rick Shepherd. Before he joined Polonious, Rick was a senior executive at a nationwide Private Investigation firm. His ability to understand your business quickly will provide you with list of hard and soft savings this unique product provides. Rick’s number is 561.515.6040.

Alternatively, contact us using this form and we will respond rapidly:

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In military science, Logistics involves the art of carrying out troop movements.  To your business, it means making sure you have the right personnel conducting the right investigations in the right areas to give you the highest degree of efficiency and effectiveness.  Good on-line mapping functionality can help tremendously when it comes to this area of your business.

Logistics are one of the most overlooked aspects of the investigation business and they are perhaps the area where the most savings and operational improvements can be made.   From a cost standpoint, there are travel and overtime savings that can be realized by implementing good logistics management.   From a strategical standpoint, putting the right investigator on the job can be the key to a successful investigation.

Good investigation management software should do all of that for you.  The right business application, one that integrates mapping, scheduling, and case management will give you a leg up on your competition and save time and money in the allocation process.     You should know how close your investigators are to their weekly hours-worked capacity,  who is best qualified to do the case, and who is the most geographically desirable person to allocate to.  With that knowledge in hand, you’ll be able to make the right logistical decisions for your company.

Let’s say for example that on Thursday you get a call from a client assigning a two-day weekend surveillance  in Bakersville.   Your investigator, Albert, is only two miles away from Bakersville and would seem to be the logical choice for allocation.  When looking at your map, you see the following:  Three investigators Albert, Brenda, and Charlie, all within a 30 mile radius of Bakersville, and Dan, who is 80 miles from Bakersville.   If you have the right application, you can roll over each of your investigators and drill down to the details to get a complete story and decide who to give the case to.

When you roll over Albert you see that he’s already done four surveillances this week and posted 36 hours.  If you assign two more days to him, you could be looking at 12 hours of overtime.  So you roll over Brenda’s icon and see that she has only 16 hours of work so far this week.  You click to take a look at her schedule.  Turns out she’s booked this weekend for an important client.  When you look at Charlie, he too only has 16 hours logged and he’s free this weekend.  But as you drill down into the detail, you realize that his cover was blown on a case in this very same neighborhood just two weeks ago.  You decide not to send him on this one.

That leaves Dan.  Even though Dan has only worked 20 hours this week, you’re still reluctant to send him all that way to do the case which is 80 miles from his home.  But when you drill down to Dan’s schedule, you see that he has a Saturday afternoon statement only 15 miles away from Bakersville.   Now you realize that you actually have a great opportunity to “piggy-back” a case for Dan so that you don’t incur extra travel costs!  Perfect! You decide Dan is the best guy for the job and give him the assignment.

Good investigation companies have an edge over their competition when it comes to scheduling, personnel management,  and moving the chess pieces around on the board to maximize the use of their investigators.  The right kind of software makes that process a whole lot easier for you.

Key points:

1. View subject address(es) on map.
2. Show closest investigators, their workloads on map.
3. Show future events in that area to ‘piggy back’ on another assignment.
4. Show past events for intel purposes – have you ever been sprung by a prior claimant..?

All the Best
Richard Shepherd
President US Operations

Improving the investigative process can  be burdensome for your team if it’s not handled correctly.  Communicating the new steps, training employees on the new steps and rolling it all out can take time.  This is harder if the new process is not part of your case management tool. This article explores how companies determine if a change is needed, how they implement the change and what ensures that the changes are embedded in your team’s best practice.

As we’ve mentioned before, great investigation management software needs the ability to map your investigative process directly into the software itself. This provides many advantages to investigation management teams:

• It makes your approach to each type of investigation consistent. Your clients will love this.
• It ensures you’re not missing things; Due diligence is done and metrics are recorded.
• It makes training easier;  All your information is located in one tool, not spreadsheets, documents, hallway meetings or pieces of paper.
• It’s a focal point for improvement. As you identify weaknesses in your investigation process, you can refine it and relay it to your team.

Old methods work OK but software that maps to your way of doing things right and is flexible enough to meet your needs in the future is a better road map for making a good investigations team into a great investigations team. Make sure you consider this when evaluating Investigation Management Software.

As an example of this practice, there is a report in the Polonious Case Management System that  can be printed out and used as a discussion point for investigation process changes. The report identifies all key elements during the process:

• Who is responsible at each step of the investigation?
• What sort of entries are made that progress the investigation and gather the critical data?
• What process steps does an investigation flow through?

Here is an example of our current report:

Most Investigation Units that do not have this capability in place end up with an informal, people-managed process that is prone to several key problems.

1. It’s difficult to track. If you’re not recording every step of the process as a natural part of completing the investigation, it’s difficult to improve the process based on empirical data.
2. It’s difficult to make consistent. People are people – they forget things, sometimes they even ‘forget’ things accidentally if you know what I mean. It’s better that the system helps them choose the best path for them and the investigation unit. Ensuring consistent process ensures your ongoing success.
3. It’s hard to analyze for weaknesses. This is a similar thing to tracking. If the data is not there, you are relying on anecdotal evidence to self-improve. This is hard to convey to your management that things need to change to improve capability.
4. It’s difficult to improve. Explaining new process to people when the tool doesn’t help them is difficult and time consuming. It often involves many hours and several employees to straighten out the process and communicate it to the team which is a barrier to continuous improvement.

The steps for improving and communicating the investigative process should be:

• Organize a management meeting after printing out the current process  eg: The surveillance process.
• Highlight the deficiencies using the provided document, mark it up for change.
• Hand it to your internal person who manages the software.
• Test the new process.
• Print out the new process and hand a copy or alternatively email to the team for a briefing.
• When you are ready, implement the new process in the one consistent tool.

I hope this article has been helpful in working through some of the techniques and problems with investigation process improvement and communication. I’ve tried to highlight why it’s important to be able to change your processes and the sorts of tools out there that can make a difference in this important area of investigation management.

All the Best

Stuart Guthrie

We are adding articles continually and invite you to email us for more product information, subscribe to the news letter (using the form on the right) or alternatively, go web 2.0 and subscribe to our rss feed on investigation management.

“We believe that Rick’s extensive experience in the insurance fraud investigation industry will provide the best possible support for our expanding client base in the USA,” said Stuart Guthrie Principal of Polonious.

Mr Shepherd has 21 years in the insurance fraud industry as an executive and officer with Claims Verification, Inc. (CVI) one of the nation’s largest insurance fraud investigation firms. He is accredited as a Certified Fraud Examiner with the ACFE.

“I am excited to have this opportunity to grow what I believe is by far the best investigation management product available in the industry,” Said Mr. Shepherd.

The Polonious investigation management system is in use in 34 Insurance fraud investigation firms and special investigation units. Over 1,200 users log into the Polonious investigation management system daily to manage their fraud investigations.

‘Buy or build’ is always at the top of mind when considering where best to invest your money in a new Investigation Management System. As a long-term IT developer/leader in a large variety of industries, I have seen a lot of money spent of software R&D. Some of it well spent, some not.

As you consider the build option, please use this document. It will explain some of the things you and your development team will need to have in place to ensure your money is well spent.

If you choose to build, please feel free to pass on this advice to your development team, your CEO, CFO, CIO, as well as your company’s board.

All parties will need to understand the level of investment and commitment required by your organisation to make an application that will work this year and still be relevant years from now.

All the best

Stuart Guthrie

Principal

Polonious

1. Get together a great team

To get there with any speed, you need a team of at least three developers. They need to be bright, gifted and extremely experienced. Sourcing and selecting this team will be difficult. Expect to retain all of them for at least a year, probably two. Expect to pay each about what you pay your senior investigators, probably more.

Numbers and quality do matter. At Polonious we have five developers, of these, most are IT Masters-qualified and are bright, gifted and keen. This development team is supplemented by a great support team.

2. Get an great team leader

You will need a team leader with substantial software development experience in many industries. They need to have lead and developed many projects from ground up. Their knowledge of the chosen language and business requirement will need to be second to none. This will help you run the team efficiently and prevent a lot of problems as the project evolves. Expect to pay this leader close to what your senior management get paid, if you’ve found a bargain basement price for this role, you are probably going to fail.

By way of example, I am Polonious’ team leader. I have been writing code for major corporations (including the BBC, Mercedes Benz, OTIS, Progress Software Corporation, Dept Primary Industry & Energy, Aushealth, SimsGroup, BBQ Galore, Rothschild, CommBank) for 24 years. I’ve covered most of the major industry verticals such as Accountancy, Legal, Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Distribution, Taxation, TV/media. I’ve pretty much seen most varieties of approach, learnt a bunch from them and apply this knowledge every day to our application software. This means we can produce a whole lot more for a whole lot less and pass on those savings & improvements to our customer base.

3. Make sure everyone is prepared for a long term financial commitment.

Most software products go through two financial phases.

1. An initial burst of investment which is quite high. Make sure this is 6-7 figures.

2. Followed by a permanent employee or two who sustain and slowly improve the product for the long term.

This is the basic math we use when considering the costs of build vs buy off the shelf. Of course, it’s also worth noting that your estimate of cost is likely to be incorrect by a factor of at least 2. This is the historical expectation.

Worth noting here is that unless you commit to significant long term investment, your product will die a slow death and need replacing within 5 years.

By way of example: From a large initial investment two years ago, Polonious are currently have several developers dedicated ot the improvement of our product. This figure is rising as the software sells around the globe. Whilst not all of this will be visible the next day, our customers will be assured of an on-going, improving software application that will ‘keep current’ and pleasantly surprise their clients, and their team.

4. Design with the future in mind.

As you build your IMS, make sure you make the right strategic decisions about your computer language that will future-proof your investment. If you depend on any one computer operating system or database, you could end up requiring a re-write of the application.

For example, fifteen years ago, DEC, Wicat, Wang still existed and IBM were the ones to beat. Very few people thought Microsoft was good for anything beyond the local area network. There are many applications written on those and other platforms that required expensive re-writes when the ‘big name’ platform behind them failed.

It’s highly likely that even the current great players such as Microsoft, Apple and even Google will not be around or significant in the next few years. An investment in .net for example, is probably money wasted.

Long term industry and IT experience are crucial to your return on investment. Polonious are building for the future years of IT evolution. Our product PCMS works on all currently sold operating systems (UNIX, Microsoft, Apple, SUN, etc), and against almost all current databases (DB2,Oracle,SQL-Server,Postgresql,MySQL). As an example, we can scale up to 64-CPU IBM Power Series (big enough to run the largest  Insurer) or down to a little PC in the corner office. We continually invest significantly to keep the technology current and useful to our client-base. Are you prepared to stand by your developers and ensure this with an internal built application?

5. Make sure your development team is continually improving their game.

In IT, the pace of change is relentless. It is vital that you provide your team the time to step back from your development requirements and work through new tools and industry best practice. Most in-house development shops do not have the financial resources to do this. Getting this right allows for sustained improvements in developer productivity. Without doing this, you are over-spending on old practices and tools.

By way of example, Polonious are constantly evolving the development process to get more for our investment from the team. These processes are on-going and shared by the whole team. They cover areas such as tool improvements, unit testing frameworks, web development plugins, new applications for integration, industry developments and business process improvements.

6. Make sure software is your core business.

A lot of large companies these days are focusing on what they do best. For example, outsourcing  is a question asked now in every department of a corporation, not just the call centre. The reason for this focus. We realise that if it’s not core to our business, it’s often better to outsource it to the experts, let them deliver what they know best for less than was spent in-house.

If you want to build an Investigation Management System that will compete, you will have to make software as important as your core business and invest accordingly.

7. Be passionate about new IT frontiers.

We suggest that your team leader puts aside about 25% of their time to explore and work out how to utilise all the new technologies as they evolve.

This is vital – development you do today might be constraining your future options. A current example, Google dedicate 20% of every developer’s time to this task. Make sure you budget for it – in the long term, the reward is there.

At Polonious, we are constantly looking for what we can do to improve our products. We have projects launched concerning Mapping, GPS, Video Streaming, Mobile Phone interfaces, BPM (Business Process Management), and many other areas. Some of these are complete, some are just experimental, they all push our customer base ahead of their competitors.

9. Make sure you match the competitors feature-for-feature.

In order for your application to grow and improve, it needs to be winning you some business sales in the industry. The decision to hire your company may come down to the quality of the software interface. If so, shouldn’t you be at least on parity with your competitors?

To stay at least on parity, ensure you will need to match or beat the level of investment at IMS software companies year-on-year.

Polonious is a market leading IMS product in Australian and the US. We match and beat our competitors in capability and are ready to demonstrate this as required.

10. Ensure your IT infrastructure is secure and resilient.

As you deploy your application, you will need to show in tenders how you are handling network hackers, that your application has fail-over, rollback and clustering incorporated. You will also need to indicate what your network monitoring solution is and what professionals you have in place to manage all this. Internal expertise in these fields can be hard to come by. You will need to allocate some money for these needs: security checks, monitoring, servers, infrastructure, backups, resilience, disaster recovery planning.

Polonious’  solution handles security, Intrusion Detection Systems, firewalls, network monitoring, VM, clustering and failover. You can confidently answer these questions on tenders with ‘Yes, absolutely’.

11. Test, test, retest and test again.

Quality is king in software. It is vital that when your software is released, you reduce the downtime due to bugs and other issues to a minimum. Your Investigation business will depend on a bug-free IMS product. You will probably need to invest at least 25% of another person over the life of the project. This person will need to document and test the application. This resource will need to be relatively senior to ensure that the testing covers all requirements.

Polonious has people assigned to test and document PCMS on an on-going basis.

12. Keep on investing in R&D

Budget to spend each year keeping your team in place and enhancing the product. This will allow you to keep pace with your competitors (such as the 30+ investigation companies and SIUs that use Polonious).

We believe the future of the investigation industry world-wide will move to require excellence in IT as well as excellence in services. To compete, investigation companies will need to either invest a high percentage of their profits in software development or start losing client tenders as they fall due.

Polonious invests continually to provide their clients with the best IT solution available. This means our clients are able to win and keep these tenders as they come up.

13. The end game – The Upside. You can sell it to other companies

Take a step back and think about this.

Your competitors, sharing all their client details, contacts, caseloads, opportunities, markets and trends with you. Not an appealing proposition really.

Polonious is a software company that has built an enviable reputation for service with a varied clientele who know they can trust us with their business.

Without a world-class case management software solution, your capabilities to compete and win in todays tough investigations space are diminished.

PCMS is a force-multiplier, that enables your team to achieve more with your limited resource. This will make your ultimate clients (be they internal departments or external to your organisation) much happier and improve the feedback loop, bringing you more referrals. This is what we see in our client base.

If your competitors are using solutions like PCMS they will have:

• Faster turnaround times
• Lower Administration costs
• Lower Management costs
• More files from existing clients
• Less resource required to complete investigations

A world-class investigation management solution is central to your business. Like the latest video equipment in surveillance teams, your business cannot do without it.

Significant investment every year

Have you ever considered what you need to invest internally on your ’software guy’ over 10 years to ensure that your investigation management capability matches the field? A world class investigation management system should be right now considering technology on the table for adaption to your needs. These new capabilities are exciting and your customers will want them when they see them… and they are coming. Are you ready to be a great IT company as well as a great Investigation Management company?

Deal Breaker: GPS visual, reportable, web-based?

Although you probably do use this to some degree, is it embedded in your maps, your reports, your client logon? Can you easily prove effort from a log or does it take you hours of effort per request? If not, your competitors can beat you on cost and capability. Our customers can I’m sorry to say.

Deal Breaker: Mapping

We’ve all been wowed by the capabilities or a good map. Our offices are covered in them. Pins everywhere, we even point at them a lot and say things like ‘Joes is there on Monday and There on Tuesday’. This sort of tech really should be able to feed off your case information don’t you think. Some of the better case tools out there (like PCMS) already do. Our customers are benefiting from better allocation, better scheduling, better client awareness/communication and better long-term territory management.

Deal Breaker: Cell Phones

As these devices gain in capability, there will be a time where your case software will be embedded in the cell phone. You need to be considering that the competition is developing applications in this space already and their teams will have cellphone access to their case data, be able to log entries, locate points of importance, take and instantly upload photos, video and other things.

The bolt-on play

An alternative to an integrated capable investigation software solution is the bolt-on. This is where you get a bunch of different technologies and get your own IT guys (yes, you will need more than 1) to integrate them, enter the configurations, test each update and it’s effects on the others and generally do what an IT team does. The problems with this approach are that unless you have some seriously good IT guys available, you will quickly end up burning hours loading data between all these applications. We’ve seen it, we’ve replaced it in more than 30 companies so far.

The Next Generation

To get to the next generation, you are going to need to invest internally or externally. Vendors like Polonious are able to aggregate the cost of these technology changes across a large install base and keep the cost of the software down. We believe you need to be looking at either alternative carefully.

With a software solution that is based on business process that enables users to define metrics, roles and relationships it is a no brainer to build your CRM into your investigation management software.

This allows your sales team to contribute valuable data about our clients that spans back to the very formation of your relationship. Rates, deals, contracts and all communications including account reviews are available as a base of knowledge for your organization.

Not only does this save on the cost of a separate CRM solution the it enables management to measure the the performance of the sales team and all other aspects of their business from one central solution.

As the relationship develops and you allow the clients to log in and view and even review your work those metrics can also be collected and surfaced to the client during regular account reviews involving them even further in the process.

Reports allow you to monitor which client contacts are choosing you to do their investigations and monitors any increase or decrease over time. This allows your team to act quickly when they see a trend that needs their attention.

Sales teams log in from anywhere in the same way as investigators or clients and update their sales tasks in real time allowing you to keep track of your sales pipeline and forecasts. Client managers can be assigned and commissions calculated based on real data from a single solution. Reminders can be set or automated as can escalations and warning statuses along with emails and text messages.

It is critical to manage your sales efforts and share your successes and failures, either potentially causing you to change your process which is easily achieved in a flexible solution.

This direct link between client history, current relationship and workloads greatly strengthens any managers view of his business and ability to react to change or inactivity.

With all the features you need from a CRM included in your core business solution you greatly enhance your understanding of your business and your relationships with your clients.

So where have other enterprises like yours gone and what has it got them? Any good world-class case management solution will be able to reel out a list of customers, such as this:

Horsemen, Inc – California, USA

Customer since: March 2007

Investigators on original implementation: 65

Investigators at current point: 85

Unique benefits: Embedding of their unique business process and efficiencies around admin staff reductions (20%) and client reporting (many hours per month not in front of a spreadsheet).

Elite Investigations – Nevada, USA

Customer since: June 2009

Investigators on original implementation: 10

Investigators at current point: 10

Unique benefits: Embedding of their unique business process and efficiencies around admin staff reductions (20%) and client reporting (many hours per month not in front of a spreadsheet).

Verifact, Nationwide, Australia

Customer since: May 2006

Investigators on original implementation: 200+

Investigators at current point: 200+

Unique benefits: Verifact have grown their case load significantly since adopting PCMS. The team manage a huge variety of different customer needs due to the underlying flexibility of the product.

The Crux Investigation Group – Nationwide Australia

Customer since: April 2007

Investigators on original implementation: N/A

Unique benefits: Crux brings together specialty investigation companies from all states of Australia. PCMS has allowed CRUX to colaborate and consistently deliver on cases as both individual companies and as part of a nationwide network. In Crux own words: The ECMS brings enhanced organization, tracking and automation to the complex process of insurance-related investigations. The system manages the process from beginning to end, driving investigative best practices throughout. Investigation progress is tracked in real time and findings can be analyzed and reported instantaneously in a range of formats to suit our group managers and external customers.

Nothing achieves this more than a track record of success and being able to demonstrate that success clearly to your clients or prospects.

Good software solutions will enable you to build your core business metrics into the application and report on those same metrics. This enables you to surface your success and unique value to your clients and prospects. The loop between unique metrics to collecting those in a business process to reporting on them, should be the building block of any good investigation solution.

A simple example of this is the recording of things like the collection of video by surveillance investigators. By collecting this via investigator log entries from the field you can at any time surface to your clients how you are performing currently and historically.

This along with the the ability to record and report on other core metrics like turn around times, rush investigations and even breaking those into business process milestones so your clients understand that you are not only capable of recording such things, but regularly reporting on them to a higher standard than your competitors, will win you business.

There is nothing more powerful than being with a client who asks ‘How do I know these statistics are real’ and being able to run the report in front of them listing all the investigations that formed part of that report. Then inviting them to click on any one and review you data.

Once the client realizes that this is not just a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet you threw together in excel and that it is based on data collected in real time from the field, they will believe.

Your sales and marketing just got a whole lot easier.

Because of this, your case management solution must deliver significantly better return than the investment made. In terms of vendor costs, you should be looking at an ROI of twelve months or less. This ROI should include a component of one-off savings as well as significant on-ongoing savings.

These are the areas you should see significant improvement from your acquisition of a case management solution:

Increase case load

Your investigation management software must get you to a point where it truly embeds your investigation process (your’s not your software vendors).

In our experience, if this is the case your tool will then provide you with increase case load. This will be due to:

• Staff knowing what to do next (the software will tell them via it’s work queues)
• The data you enter once is re-used many times for many purposes.
• Your manual/click/copy/paste jobs you do in office documents are now automatic.

This means that you can increase your case load without increasing your admin staff or alternatively repurpose your admin staff to productive, money earning areas of the business due to the efficiencies of your new software.

Delivery 1-3 days earlier

Your software purchase needs to improve your delivery by at least 1-3 days. With this new capability, you will grow your business in accounts. Many clients ‘handle’ their vendor panel by how much they believe each vendor can cope with. This is your ‘capacity’ in the eyes of your client. If you are turning your files faster, you will be perceived as able to cope with a higher file rate. This is the experience of our customers, they grow this perception with their clients due to hitting on-time every time benchmarks, something their competitors are not always able to do.

In one case, a firm of 200+ investigators improved their turnaround to the point where ‘on time everytime’ became their byline.

Force multiplier

Your case management solution should also realise a return in the ratio of investigators to case managers/other admin staff. It is typical to save around 20% on administration costs due to re-purposing of staff from back-office to chargeable work. 20% admin costs reduction gives your firm a significant jump on their competitors, it’s a major reason why our customers are all growing and expanding their file counts without their internal costs growing at the same rate.

Increase profits

A truly world-class case management system will improve your profitability in these areas of your P&L. This table demonstrates the areas that you benefit:

Known and controllable IT Costs

A significant headache to all Investigation management practices is the never-ending, unknown of IT. Some of the surprises we’ve been told about include:

• Server replacements and upgrades.
• Server exchange housing
• Organising and ensuring backups, penetration testing and other things required by your clients.
• Microsoft licensing requirements.
• ‘The software guy’ leaves, dies or becomes disinterested.
• Your client wants another bunch of integration/spreadsheets/reports and your resource is on a break.
• Technology changes and you need to invest another $100K to keep up.

Your case management system must bring clarity and consistency to this problem. A world-class solution will give you no surprises and an ever improving ROI every single year.

Polonious Investigation Management Systems brings enhanced organization, tracking and automation to case management.

The solution manages the process from referral to close, driving best practices throughout.

Real time information, dashboards and timelines contribute to operational efficiency and the most effective use of resources. The result is improved outcomes and savings on operational costs.

The cost benefits of moving to a single point of reference for users, vendors, clients and specialists with integrated messaging and document management enables an impressive return on investment.

Polonious works with all our clients to define their business processes and replicate them within the solution. We also assist and manage the implementation and adoption of the solution.

Spend less and achieve a higher quality result every time.

Are you interested in achieving this?

If so, take the first step and contact us.

More here.

• Turnaround times down.
• File referrals up..
• Administration Costs down.
• Management Costs down.
• CRM Costs down.
• Software development Costs down.
• Server Costs down.
• IT Personnel Costs down.

What does a world class case management software service look like?

More here.

PIMS Lite is the product that fits your needs, unlike it’s competitors it provides enterprise capabilities for the small and growing practice.

PIMS Lite uses the same technology used by companies with hundreds of investigators. It’s nice to know that as you grow, we can grow with you..

For details click here.