Bluffton Police Department

20% reduction in overtime costs.

300 extra duty assignments managed.

83% reduction in time spent scheduling.

 

How do they manage 300 special events assignments a year?

Bluffton PD, located in beautiful South Carolina, faced some tough scheduling problems prior to using InTime. High extra-duty demand coupled with exorbitant overtime costs put a strain on the department’s time and resources. Paper-based processes caused long delays in scheduling decisions and was prone to human error.

Bluffton Police Department’s Challenges

HIGH EXTRA-DEMAND

Bluffton PD manages over 300 extra duty events a year. The challenge is managing employee fatigue, signups and client satisfaction.

HIGH OVERTIME COSTS

With no easy way of building reports and limited oversight, Bluffton PD was running as high as 20% over-budget on OT.

SLOW PAPER PROCESSES

Payroll issues and policy breaches wouldn’t be spotted until weeks later due to inefficient paper processes. Furthermore, posting and filling signups was a long and tedious process that often resulted in error and inequitable allocation.

How the Bluffton Police Department did it

We talked with Bluffton PD to get some insights into how InTime has helped to streamline their paper processes.

UNDER BUDGET FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER

Reducing overtime costs primarily came down to using InTime’s advanced reporting to make informed scheduling decisions. Supervisors at Bluffton PD are now able to track where overtime is being spent and even drill down into specific special duty events to analyze overtime hours.

Supervisors running day-to-day scheduling now get a notification if they are scheduling an employee into overtime. Even more, InTime runs a query to find employees with the least amount of overtime (and/or any other compliance rules) to work any particular shift. Using all these InTime tools, Bluffton PD was able to reduce overtime costs by over 20%!

MANAGING 300 EXTRA-DUTY ASSIGNMENTS WITH NO PROBLEM

When you’re dealing with 300+ extra duty events a year, it’s imperative that your extra duty and day-to-day scheduling is integrated. This has allowed Bluffton PD to not only easily manage off-duty scheduling and posting, it enables them to:

  • be accountable for all their officers
  • manage employee fatigue
  • prevent double bookings
  • reduce overtime costs
  • equitably allocate extra-duty shifts
  • reduce their liability
SAY GOODBYE TO PAPER

In the past, supervisors had to consult hundreds of paper documents in order to manage scheduling and operations. Now that everything is centralized on InTime, scheduling is fast. Before InTime, schedules had to be manually built from payroll period to payroll period. InTime mitigates the need for this process and simply enables Bluffton’s supervisors to monitor schedules and make exceptions. InTime has reduced the time Bluffton PD spends scheduling by 83%!

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