WinScribe Eases the Workload for City of Plymouth Police

The City of Plymouth, Minnesota is home to over 70,000 people and has built a reputation as a quality community in which to live and work. It is this reputation that its citizens, community leaders and the Plymouth Police Department are dedicated to maintaining and enhancing.

The Challenge – Managing Information Better

The day-to-day activities of the Plymouth Police Department involve a myriad of reports that are created and accessed by numerous parties both inside and outside of the department. Until recently, any information that needed to be recorded or transcribed was dictated on to analog tapes which then had to be physically delivered to a typist, or to a third-party requiring the information. “It was very difficult to manage information using tapes”, explains Tianhong Zhang, Assistant Manager IT Services for the City of Plymouth. “The information was hard to transfer, retrieve and archive – and cross-referencing it with our record system was almost impossible.” 

The Solution – WinScribe

The City issued a Request For Proposal specifying its requirements to eight vendors and received seven responses back. “WinScribe met most or all of our requirements”, says Tianhong, “and offered the best value for money of all the solutions. Another major reason for selecting WinScribe was its simplicity  – less steps to implement and less hardware at the backend.”

“The Police Department has 70 authors primarily using Olympus DS400 digital portables for dictation”, confirms Tianhong. “Most of the authors are officers but other personnel such as Lieutenants and Sergeants also use it.” The department also has 9 clerical staff working on Mondays when there can be up to 80 dictations to transcribe, but on average there are 4 clerical staff transcribing around 25 dictations per day.

Initially it was a challenging implementation for both the service provider, Northland Business Systems, and the City as the department had some complex routing and archiving requirements. Some of the users went through a bit of a learning curve when it came to using the new recording devices and downloading their dictation to the WinScribe system, but the final result has been very positive according to Tianhong.

The County has since mandated that all local government offices move to digital dictation but the City is pleased that it made the move sooner as it realizes the benefits the technology offers.

The Results – Better Productivity and Control

Productivity has definitely been improved by the move to WinScribe. Personnel no longer have to wait to get access to information and multiple users can be accessing the same file at the same time. People can access the system anytime, from anywhere on the network and the City can control who has access to files by establishing the appropriate permissions. Tianhong sums it up by saying: “Retrieval of information is much easier and manageability is greatly enhanced. Users know where the dictation is, how many are waiting, and can access it from anywhere and at anytime – even while it’s in the queue waiting to be typed.”

Clerical staff have also been able to manage their workflow more efficiently since the WinScribe system was implemented. They now know how long a file is and can pick a job from the queue according to their schedule. The Supervisor of the Clerical division knows which of her staff is working on a particular job and finds the process status information and reports particularly useful.

Information archiving is much more efficient and the City has saved a huge amount of physical storage space by not having to keep tapes. Future plans include transferring the information currently stored on tapes to the digital file system so that all dictations can be cross-referenced with the record management system.

“The payback on the WinScribe system is clearly good but it’s difficult to accurately measure it”, admits Tianhong. “And as with any change, it took some of our users awhile to get used to a new way of doing things, but they like it a lot now.”

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