How Lancaster City PD Found a Solution for Managing Personnel Schedules

June 1, 2020

Law enforcement agencies make tough decisions every day as they protect and serve their communities. Agencies must educate and train officers, manage ever-tighter budgets and schedule staff appropriately.

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PlanIt Schedule

Proper staffing saves police and public lives, but it lives and dies by good scheduling tools. The Lancaster Bureau of Police once struggled with scheduling. Until a few years ago, the department, which employs 145 sworn police officers and 80 civilian support personnel, managed staffing in an archaic Microsoft Access database.

The agency’s paper-based overtime scheduling also made it hard to schedule overtime fairly. According to department policy, overtime is first come, first serve. But the agency needed a mechanism to track which officers raised their hands first.

Read more at the Officer.com SMARTpaper "How Lancaster City PD Found a Solution for Managing Personnel Schedules"

About PlanIt Schedule

PlanIt Schedule provides a robust yet easy-to-use online personnel scheduling system for public safety services. The system was developed in 2005 to provide a solution for the tedious day-to-day scheduling challenges public safety organizations face. Since then, PlanIt has grown to now provide a scheduling solution for over 700 agencies throughout the US.

With the majority of our clients being in law enforcement, PlanIt Police includes unique features to streamline the management of things like rotating officer schedules, extra duty shifts, court appearances, and much more. Instead of having to create the schedule and print it out or send it out to each person in the department, it will populate automatically for everyone to see from wherever they are. There are multiple communication tools in PlanIt like mass email/text/call notifications, internal messages, and dashboard announcements.

While scheduling software saves time, it also improves communication because the information is available to everyone from wherever they are. The schedule is always real-time so if a change is made to the schedule, everyone can see that immediately. Additionally, open shifts will appear on the schedule whenever you fall below minimum staffing. This allows the shift to be visible to everyone while also providing the opportunity for officers to request to work the shift. Learn more about the features included in PlanIt, here: https://www.planitpolice.com/features

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