Over the past few years, SAP Investigative Case Management (ICM) has become a prominent solution in multiple Australian Industries. Law Enforcement, Border Protection, Correctional Services, Defence & Public Safety services have been implementing ICM into their online programs. ICM is an SAP solution designed for organisations to conduct various types of investigations and case management processes. It has become a leading solution in these industries due to its powerful case management capabilities and its recent migration to S/4HANA 1909 release. This blog is an introduction to our series of ICM blogs with each entry being written from a different DalRae Solution’s SAP consultant expressing their point of view into ICM. This entry is an overview of what DalRae Solutions will be discussing in our series, looking at POLE model, the capability of ICM, the extensibility of ICM, ICM’s user experience and how we implemented it into the NZ Police Firearm Reform.
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Tim is a technologist with a business mindset who is experienced in a broad range of systems delivering organisational capability. He has a proven track record of empowering and managing teams in operational and technical capacities. Tim’s main focus is to develop relationships with stakeholders; engaging with teams to successfully deliver project initiatives. |
Part 1: POLE Model
The Pole Model framework gathers data in a logical sense that ensures all information is readily available when responding to cases. This is the core of ICM’s flexibility, it is simple in concept despite supporting complex case management processes. Once the data is stored, you can be proactive, interrogate the data and identify patterns or links that may represent a concern. It leverages five core capabilities; people, objects, location, events and relationships that relate back to the case.
People
People represent the individuals who have a relationship to the case. The person may be an individual who has witnessed the event, or someone more directly involved. ICM has the capability to build profiles of people, thereby gaining the ability to create records with little to no information through to a detailed dataset. There is also the ability to upload photos whilst also categorising their profile within the ICM solution.
Objects
The ICM solution allows you to input objects that are related to the case. An object can be anything physical (vehicle, DNA, company assets) or virtual (emails, electronic documents). Features of the object can be included in the database, including adding multiple assignments of images and their metadata and the option to categorize the objects in a hierarchy. With SAP’s extensibility framework, you can easily record a variety of contextual attributes against the object based on the selected categorisation.
Location
A fundamental aspect of ICM is the capture of locations which represent where an event has occurred, a significant location related to the case or as an additional element of data relating to the individuals involved in the case. Locations are geographical places by address or geo-coordinates, although the case’s exact address and geo-coordinates may still be unknown when the location is created. ICM offers the ability to store multiple aspects about the location:
- Other Names that a location is known as – integrated into the search
- Multiple assignment of images
- Metadata for images
- Map integration
- Option to categorise in a hierarchy
- Geo-location (Geocoordinates)
Events
Events are represented by the incident object and allows the user to capture details about something that has occurred and can be used as a container to group together various elements that help to describe the event that has occurred such as who was there, what objects were involved and where it happened. An event can be an injury of an officer, insubordination or a major event involving multiple injuries.
Relationships
Relationships are used to bring everything together within ICM and describe how one element of the POLE model is related to another element of the POLE model. A person can have a relationship as the primary suspect to a witness, or an address can have a relationship as the location at which a significant event occurred. Relationships relate the elements of the POLE model to one another. Due to the elements of the POLE model being able to have a many-to-many relationship, users of ICM can expose patterns of how a location, person or object has been involved in a variety of events over a period of time.
Capability of ICM
POLE Model indicates how capable ICM can be for a multitude industries in Australia. You can implement the system as an intelligence system for police enforcement or in a financial system to capture the interactions a customer has with your organisation. An event can be an injury to an officer or can be an insurance claim.
Police Enforcement Industry
Event: Injury to an officer
Location: Corner of XYZ street
Objects: Knife
Person: Officer & Witnesses
Finance Industry
Event: Insurance Claim
Location: Off the exit of XYZ Highway
Objects: 2 Vehicles
Person: Employee & person making claim
As you can see the POLE Model can be used for two completely different industries without difficulty, indicating the capability ICM has for industries due to the flexibility of its functionality.
Extensibility of the Solution
Furthermore, ICM’s flexibility can be further illustrated by its ability to incorporate other software solutions that enrich the user experience. The ability to extend the components of ICM to capture more explicit data sets or to add solution extensions without complicating the user experience is crucial moving forward in the SAP industry. With the implementation of ICM in SAP S/4HANA ICM users can take advantage of SAP’s core solution software and to leverage the rich cloud-based capability in the SAP Business Technology Platform.
User Experience
If you look from a UX point of view, it can be overwhelming and complex as users may find UX very discouraging and difficult due to the complexity of its capabilities. To address this, SAP has provided the ability to adjust the front-end and expose additional fields or remove fields so that the UI is able to capture the most relevant information for the business scenario being executed. Furthermore, the sequence on which data capture is performed can be altered to ensure it supports the business. Where there are complex use cases that an organisation wants to capture in ICM and expose the solution to a broad range of usersit may be advantageous to provide a custom front end that focuses on keeping the core components of the solution standard while providing the capability to deliver automation of key elements of the business process.
NZ Police Firearm Reform– Citizen incident firearm surrender
DalRae Solutions partnered with SAP to deliver NZ Police the Firearm Reform solution in three months; which would not have been possible without ICM. We delivered an end-to-end solution that:
- Enabled citizens to notify the police that they had firearms to hand-in
- Enabled citizens to manage their notifications
- Enabled police employees to perform the same tasks as a citizen
- Enabled police employees to record the handover of a firearm
- Pay citizens for the firearms that have been handed in
- Track firearms throughout its lifecycle until it is destroyed, and destroy firearms
A core reason we were able to complete these tasks in 3 months was because of the extensibility of ICM. We managed to face little to no adversity integrating DocuSign & SAP Cloud Platform into the solution. ICM never forced us to over-complicate the solution as extensibility allowed us to use consistent patterns when developing solutions, leveraging the cloud platform capabilities. Designing the NZ Police’s solution would have taken longer than 3 months without ICM’s flexibility.
Conclusion
It will be interesting to see the roadmap of ICM as it becomes a more common solution amongst SAP Partners. Additionally, how SAP will continue to update ICM and how they will deal with it’s complexity from a broad point of view.
