Capgemini and Oracle t-Police cloud ERP finds 'at least 40 per cent' savings for cash-strapped UK forces

Cheshire Police expect to save £30m over 10 years

Capgemini has been using Oracle's E-Business Suite and Integrated Policing platforms to develop a cloud ERP system that is rapidly spreading across police forces in the UK, and apparently saving "at least 40 per cent" in spend on such systems.

The platform - called t-Police - has been in development by Capgemini for six years, and has been rolled out to Cheshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Norfolk police forces, some as part of the Multi-Force Shared Service (MFSS) initiative, which shares service centre and back-office support functions. It's also in the process of being rolled out to London's Met Police.

"In terms of a business rationale, it's safe to say that [t-Police] is an integrated cloud platform built for police, with police. That's really important," explained Nick James, senior vice president for public sector at Capgemini, speaking in a session at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco today.

Expressed as both a front and back office set of systems, t-Police was designed, said James, at a time when Capgemini was "bidding and delivering lots and lots of front end and back office police systems", and decided it could begin offering a more unified proposition to police forces.

"A few years ago we took the decision to stop reinventing the wheel for each customer's requirements, and to create a standardised, integrated platform, and we chose Oracle to power it, and we built it."

Covering both front office and back office services - front office comprising features such as crime recording, case handling, warrants and weapon registration, and back office handling HR, inventory, purchasing, accounts payable and expenses - the whole t-Police package is "an adopt service" and not "a bespoke build each time", James said.

"Our colleagues in Oracle have played a key role in providing underpinning technology across all layers of the stack," said James.

According to James, Capgemini noticed that police forces before were using platforms with "siloed things, including systems. Nearly all customers had separate systems - siloed systems - and siloed infrastructure, with hardcoding across".

Some staff, said James, were still processing paper forms and other "pieces of paper" to achieve rudimentary tasks.

"The TCO [total cost of ownership] was very high," observed James.

"We asked if we could offer a much more integrated platform - in this case a cloud-based platform - not only to move customer experience, but to take the cost out of operations."

The resulting t-Police platform bases a lot of its processes around "pre-designed templates" that are aligned to "police regulations and independent industry benchmarks". Capgemini estimates the ROI releases "cash savings in months rather than years".

Cheshire Police Authority said it is expecting savings of "at least £30m over 10 years" since adopting t-Police.

Because of the industry standards, James said that t-Police offers "at least 80 per cent of capabilities out of the box" and may eventually not even be limited to UK police, theoretically working "anywhere in future".

Colin Daly, technical director for Oracle business unit at Capgemini, talked about a rollout plan "based on speed".

"What we have here is something where we try to have something deliverable within six months for a smaller force and probably around nine months for a larger force," he explained.

There is even "cross-functional" reporting, which uses Oracle BI Cloud, HCM Cloud and Duty Management, which is a bespoke policing platform developed by Schedule24.

James said Capgemini has customers "getting real benefits - we've seen it in the real world" with "significant cost savings".

"[We've seen] at least 40 per cent cashable cost savings. That's critical to protect the font line," he said.

"[UK forces] made a brave decision to go for a standardised ERP platform, and we invested with them to create that, adopting all their processes, and since then it's led to shared services and uptake from the Metropolitan Police, which is a great result," concluded James.