For public safety and security agencies, investigative demands and operational complexity are constantly increasing. They need to manage complex investigative processes and meet the rising public expectations to ensure the best investigative outcomes. SAP Investigative Case Management for public sector facilitates processes across the public sector. The software empowers the users to remain informed in real time from any location. SAP Investigative case management allows to rapidly collect and analyse information, effectively deploy resources and manage assets in a structured and transparent way.
SAP Investigative Case Management for SAP S/4HANA is an on-premise only solution and is released to the in S/4HANA release 1909 FPS00. In this blog we will discuss about the “PEOPLE” component in the Pole Model Framework in detail.
In our last blog, we briefly discussed what is POLE model framework and how it enables ICM to be extremely flexible even for complex use cases. Data in ICM is distributed in a way to make the most logical sense which helps in quickly reviewing and understanding the case and related information. For the Master Data, ICM provides a configurable entity model in which you can enter detailed data for the entities People, Objects, Locations, and Events. You can create associations between the respective entity data using Relationships and rate the reliability of the linked data using a Reliability Matrix.
Tanveer is one of our Junior Software Developers who came through our graduate program in 2019. She graduated with Masters in Information Technology from James Cook University with exemplary academic records. Tanveer has professional experience in SAP UI5 framework, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, JSON, OData. Understanding of SAP Cloud Application Programming Model, Annotations.
People
Also technically known as PERSONS AND ORGANIZATIONS are parties that are linked to the case. These parties are an important aspect of case management. In a typical scenario they can be suspects, victims, witnesses, or criminal organizations, or professionals working on their behalf, such as lawyers and doctors. Investigative case management involves more than just the people and organisations directly involved.
Persons and Organisations doesn’t cover the primary subjects of the case, rather those linked to the case because they could be involved in a professional context (such as a doctor or police officer) and therefore need to be categorised differently. Persons and Organizations in investigative case management are based on standard business partner functionality in S/4HANA.
Certain functions are therefore directly reused, and others have been modified for ICM purposes. An ICM specific role ‘CRMICM’ is used to distinguish ICM person/org from any other business partners in the system. In the system all the parties are typically categorized into ICM persons, ICM organizations, Individual accounts, Employees, Corporate accounts.
The tables below, elaborate these parties and their representation in the system:
| Parties (Examples) | Description | System |
| Criminals, suspects, witnesses, victims | Any individual identified as being of interest to an investigation or incident. | ICM persons |
| Gangs, criminal organizations, victims | A formal or informal group of individuals with a common interest, constituting the focus of a law enforcement agency. | ICM organizations |
| Lawyers, doctors, psychologists, surveyors | Those working on behalf of suspects, victims, witnesses. | ICM persons |
| Police officers, inspectors, crime scene investigators | Internal professionals working for the law enforcement agency. | Individual accounts |
| Parties (Examples) | Description | System |
| Criminals, suspects, witnesses, victims | Any individual identified as being of interest to an investigation or incident. | ICM persons |
| Gangs, criminal organizations, victims | A formal or informal group of individuals with a common interest, constituting the focus of a law enforcement agency. | ICM organizations |
| Lawyers, doctors, psychologists, surveyors | Those working on behalf of suspects, victims, witnesses. | ICM persons |
| Police officers, inspectors, crime scene investigators | Internal professionals working for the law enforcement agency. | Individual accounts |
| Parties (Examples) | Description | System |
| Employees of police organization | Members of the law enforcement agency. | Employees Note If an internal employee who already has an employee record in the system becomes relevant to a case, for example, as suspect or witness, a new business partner record, that is an ICM person, has to be created. This is due to country-specific legal regulations that stipulate that data related to investigative cases has to be deleted or expunged after a certain period of time. |
| State attorneys or partner police officers | External professionals working together with the law enforcement agency. | Individual accounts |
| Acting police organization, partner police organization, or the state attorney’s office | Internal or external professional organizations. | Corporate accounts and organizational model for internal police organisation structure. Note Relationships cannot be created to law enforcement organizational units. |
Credit: https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm70/helpdata/en/50/f19030ad564b00982ab3f5ef35d76b/frameset.htm
Recording Identification of People
ICM can record information about the parties who are involved in a police incident or criminal investigation to register, identify and validate them by building physical profiles. These records can have detailed information in different forms of identification, such as payment cards and identification credentials, different names under which they are known, and physical descriptions and profiles. ICM is provisioned in a manner to create these records with little to no information or large dataset of information making it a very flexible solution. Standard functions that record the data of individuals and organizations and maintain an overview of activities in which they are involved include:
- Description of Person: Physical traits about a person’s appearance, such as hair, skin, and eye colour, height and build, and voice. In each case, you can record the observation date and status, and enter information about the level of reliability of this information.
- Other Names: The party in focus may have multiple identities and may be operating under different names. These can be nicknames, false names, aliases, and so on.
- Addresses: Multiple addresses associated to the parties (e.g., Residential, Postal etc.)
- Methods of making contact: Contact details (e.g., email, phone number etc.)
- Images and supporting documentation: You can assign different types of documents to identify and validate parties involved in your investigations. You can also store photos and pictures using a specific folder for images in the Attachments assignment block. All photos are displayed in the Images assignment block in the form of an overview. Each photo can be enlarged by clicking on it. For individuals, the first photo in the folder is displayed on the overview page in the details section.
- Parties Involved: Relationships to other individuals, organizations, friends, family, membership, and so on.
- Objects and Locations: Relationships to objects (for example, “owner”) and locations (for example, “Went to school at”, “Seen at”)
- Leads, Incidents, Operations, Cases: Relationships to leads, incidents, operations, and cases, for example, as suspect, witness, reported, interrogated, and so on.
- Identification Credentials: Identity cards used by a person.
- Bank Accounts and Payment Cards
- Interaction History & Planned Activities: All past and planned activities involving the person or organization
- Change History: Changes made to records when and by whom
Building Profiles
You use profiles to create sets of information based on different types of classification. This is typically information about an individual’s education, psychology, behavioural traits, and background. When creating a profile, you select the information you require for your purposes from the different types of classification available.
Merging Records
Investigative cases can involve many parties who might be unknown or only partially known at the outset, causing many records to be created with a minimal amount of information. If you later discover that various identities in different records describe one individual or organization you can use data cleansing to compare and merge the relevant records.
Example
In one case a person P1 is unknown and just has a rough description, profile, and a number of relationships. However, another person P2, who has been identified, is assigned to another case. After further investigation on the first case, a detective discovers that P1 is identical to P2. The information recorded for P1 and P2 belong to the same person and should therefore be merged. This means retaining P2’s first name, last name, and address, and adding the description, profile, and relationships from P1.
Anonymizing Persons, Expunging and Archiving Records
In ICM use cases, records with data associated to the parties involved might be anonymized, expunged, or archived after certain dates in order to abide by the legal rules and regulations. In doing so ICM provides flexibility to anonymize one or more fields an entry.
You can refine and extend this functionality using the Business Add-In (BAdI) CRM_ICM_BP_ANONIMIZE.
During scenarios where relationships have an expunge date, ICM lets you schedule this functionality with the execution of the report RCRM_ICM_REL_EXPUNGE at regular intervals. For example, an individual is removed from one specific case, but remains in all others. In this situation the report checks if the expunge date for the relationship has been reached and will set the relationship to expunged.
A record can only be archived when the expunge date of all its relationships to other entities has been reached. Once a record has been archived the deleted relationships are no longer visible and the record no longer appears in the operational system.
Firearm Reform – ICM implementation (Persons and Organization)
In the recent Firearm Reform project, the customer enabled citizens to create notifications that include their personal details and details of any firearm/accessories they wish to submit or on behalf of another citizen. Officers could also create notifications on behalf of citizens in the system.
For this blog, we will stick to only Persons and Organization implementation. In this solution, citizens were the ICM persons, and the Officers/Employees were the Individual accounts. For both, the system creates a unique ID and assigns it to the individual, this ID is labelled: Business Partner. This unique ID can be classified as a Person or Organisation and can be assigned different roles to it. The different roles will allow each type of person/individual access to certain parts of the application.
The application used to retrieve this data was divided into 3 sections, namely, Owner/Citizen Information, Firearm Details & Further Information.
Owner Information (Person’s Details)
This section contains personal details that the claimant needs to fill in. They include First, Middle, and Last Names, Date of Birth, Email, Primary and Alternative Phone numbers, and Address (House/Street/Suburb). When a person P1 submitted on behalf of another citizen P2 a relationship between the two of them is added to the notification. In addition, P1 can create its own notification and generates a unique Business Partner, this way it creates a relationship between the Parties Involved.
Firearm Details (Relationships to objects)
This section allows the user to add any Firearms and/or Accessories that they wish to hand over.
Further Information
This section contained questions that retrieved information for Bank Accounts, Firearms Licenses.
Conclusion
An additional ICM functionality “Anonymizing Persons” was incorporated in this solution to create notifications anonymously. For some cases, data that is associated to the persons needs to be anonymous for safety and keeping within rules and regulations. In these scenarios, ICM provided flexibility to anonymize one or more fields for a person or persons to add more information to the notification, regardless of the anonymous profile and complete the process.
