Best in Class Finance Functions For Police Forces

Background

Police funding has risen by £4.8 billion and 77 per cent (39 per cent in real terms) since 1997. However the days where forces have enjoyed such levels of funding are over.

Chief Constables and senior management recognize that the annual cycle of looking for efficiencies year-on-year is not sustainable, and will not address the cash shortfall in years to come.
Facing slower funding growth and real cash deficits in their budgets, the Police Service must adopt innovative strategies which generate the productivity and efficiency gains needed to deliver high quality policing to the public.

The step-change in performance required to meet this challenge will only be achieved if the police service fully embraces effective resource management and makes efficient and productive use of its technology, partnerships and people.

The finance function has an essential role to play in addressing these challenges and supporting Forces’ objectives economically and efficiently.

Challenge

Police Forces tend to nurture a divisional and departmental culture rather than a corporate one, with individual procurement activities that do not exploit economies of scale. This is in part the result of over a decade of devolving functions from the center to the.divisions.

In order to reduce costs, improve efficiency and mitigate against the threat of “top down” mandatory, centrally-driven initiatives, Police Forces need to set up a corporate back office and induce behavioral change. This change must involve compliance with a corporate culture rather than a series of silos running through the organization.

Developing a Best in Class Finance Function

Traditionally finance functions within Police Forces have focused on transactional processing with only limited support for management information and business decision support. With a renewed focus on efficiencies, there is now a pressing need for finance departments to transform in order to add greater value to the force but with minimal costs.

1) Aligning to Force Strategy

As Police Forces need finance to function, it is imperative that finance and operations are closely aligned. This collaboration can be very powerful and help deliver significant improvements to a Force, but in order to achieve this model, there are many barriers to overcome. Finance Directors must look at whether their Force is ready for this collaboration, but more importantly, they must consider whether the Force itself can survive without it.

Finance requires a clear vision that centers around its role as a balanced business partner. However to achieve this vision a huge effort is required from the bottom up to understand the significant complexity in underlying systems and processes and to devise a way forward that can work for that particular organization.

The success of any change management program is dependent on its execution. Change is difficult and costly to execute correctly, and often, Police Forces lack the relevant experience to achieve such change. Although finance directors are required to hold appropriate professional qualifications (as opposed to being former police officers as was the case a few years ago) many have progressed within the Public Sector with limited opportunities for learning from and interaction with best in class methodologies. In addition cultural issues around self-preservation can present barriers to change.

Whilst it is relatively easy to get the message of finance transformation across, securing commitment to embark on bold change can be tough. Business cases often lack the quality required to drive through change and even where they are of exceptional quality senior police officers often lack the commercial awareness to trust them.

2) Supporting Force Decisions

Many Finance Directors are keen to develop their finance functions. The challenge they face is convincing the rest of the Force that the finance function can add value – by devoting more time and effort to financial analysis and providing senior management with the tools to understand the financial implications of major strategic decisions.

Maintaining Financial Controls and Managing Risk

Sarbanes Oxley, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), Basel II and Individual Capital Assessments (ICA) have all put financial controls and reporting under the spotlight in the private sector. This in turn is increasing the spotlight on financial controls in the public sector.

A ‘Best in Class’ Police Force finance function will not just have the minimum controls to meet the regulatory requirements but will evaluate how the legislation and regulations that the finance function are required to comply with, can be leveraged to provide value to the organization. Providing strategic information that will enable the force to meet its objectives is a key task for a leading finance function.

3) Value to the Force

The drive for development over the last decade or so, has moved decision making to the Divisions and has led to an increase in costs in the finance function. Through utilizing a number of initiatives in a program of transformation, a Force can leverage up to 40% of savings on the cost of finance together with improving the responsiveness of finance teams and the quality of financial information. These initiatives include:

Centralization

By centralizing the finance function, a Police Force can create centers of excellence where industry best practice can be developed and shared. This will not only re-empower the department, creating greater independence and objectivity in assessing projects and performance, but also lead to more consistent management information and a higher degree of control. A Police Force can also develop a business partner group to act as strategic liaisons to departments and divisions. The business partners would, for example, advise on how the departmental and divisional commanders can meet the budget in future months instead of merely advising that the budget has been missed for the previous month.

With the mundane number crunching being performed in a shared service center, finance professionals will find they now have time to act as business partners to divisions and departments and focus on the strategic issues.

The cultural impact on the departments and divisional commanders should not be underestimated. Commanders will be concerned that:

o Their budgets will be centralized
o Workloads would increase
o There will be limited access to finance individuals
o There will not be on site support

However, if the centralized shared service center is designed appropriately none of the above should apply. In fact from centralization under a best practice model, leaders should accrue the following benefits:

o Strategic advice provided by business partners
o Increased flexibility
o Improved management information
o Faster transactions
o Reduced number of unresolved queries
o Greater clarity on service and cost of provision
o Forum for finance to be strategically aligned to the needs of the Force

A Force that moves from a de-centralized to a centralized system should try and ensure that the finance function does not lose touch with the Chief Constable and Divisional Commanders. Forces need to have a robust business case for finance transformation combined with a governance structure that spans operational, tactical and strategic requirements. There is a risk that potential benefits of implementing such a change may not be realized if the program is not carefully managed. Investment is needed to create a successful centralized finance function. Typically the future potential benefits of greater visibility and control, consistent processes, standardized management information, economies of scale, long-term cost savings and an empowered group of proud finance professionals, should outweigh those initial costs.

To reduce the commercial, operational and capability risks, the finance functions can be completely outsourced or partially outsourced to third parties. This will provide guaranteed cost benefits and may provide the opportunity to leverage relationships with vendors that provide best practice processes.

Process Efficiencies

Typically for Police Forces the focus on development has developed a silo based culture with disparate processes. As a result significant opportunities exist for standardization and simplification of processes which provide scalability, reduce manual effort and deliver business benefit. From simply rationalizing processes, a force can typically accrue a 40% reduction in the number of processes. An example of this is the use of electronic bank statements instead of using the manual bank statement for bank reconciliation and accounts receivable processes. This would save considerable effort that is involved in analyzing the data, moving the data onto different spreadsheet and inputting the data into the financial systems.

Organizations that possess a silo operating model tend to have significant inefficiencies and duplication in their processes, for example in HR and Payroll. This is largely due to the teams involved meeting their own goals but not aligning to the corporate objectives of an organization. Police Forces have a number of independent teams that are reliant on one another for data with finance in departments, divisions and headquarters sending and receiving information from each other as well as from the rest of the Force. The silo model leads to ineffective data being received by the teams that then have to carry out additional work to obtain the information required.

Whilst the argument for development has been well made in the context of moving decision making closer to operational service delivery, the added cost in terms of resources, duplication and misaligned processes has rarely featured in the debate. In the current financial climate these costs need to be recognized.

Culture

Within transactional processes, a leading finance function will set up targets for staff members on a daily basis. This target setting is an element of the metric based culture that leading finance functions develop. If the appropriate metrics of productivity and quality are applied and when these targets are challenging but not impossible, this is proven to result in improvements to productivity and quality.

A ‘Best in Class’ finance function in Police Forces will have a service focused culture, with the primary objectives of providing a high level of satisfaction for its customers (departments, divisions, employees & suppliers). A ‘Best in Class’ finance function will measure customer satisfaction on a timely basis through a metric based approach. This will be combined with a team wide focus on process improvement, with process owners, that will not necessarily be the team leads, owning force-wide improvement to each of the finance processes.

Organizational Improvements

Organizational structures within Police Forces are typically made up of supervisors leading teams of one to four team members. Through centralizing and consolidating the finance function, an opportunity exists to increase the span of control to best practice levels of 6 to 8 team members to one team lead / supervisor. By adjusting the organizational structure and increasing the span of control, Police Forces can accrue significant cashable benefit from a reduction in the number of team leads and team leads can accrue better management experience from managing larger teams.

Technology Enabled Improvements

There are a significant number of technology improvements that a Police Force could implement to help develop a ‘Best in Class’ finance function.

These include:

A) Scanning and workflow

Through adopting a scanning and workflow solution to replace manual processes, improved visibility, transparency and efficiencies can be reaped.

B) Call logging, tracking and workflow tool

Police Forces generally have a number of individuals responding to internal and supplier queries. These queries are neither logged nor tracked. The consequence of this is dual:

o Queries consume considerable effort within a particular finance team. There is a high risk of duplicated effort from the lack of logging of queries. For example, a query could be responded to for 30 minutes by person A in the finance team. Due to this query not being logged, if the individual that raised the query called up again and spoke to a different person then just for one additional question, this could take up to 20 minutes to ensure that the background was appropriately explained.

o Queries can have numerous interfaces with the business. An unresolved query can be responded against by up to four separate teams with considerable delay in providing a clear answer for the supplier.

The implementation of a call logging, tracking and workflow tool to document, measure and close internal and supplier queries combined with the set up of a central queries team, would significantly reduce the effort involved in responding to queries within the finance departments and divisions, as well as within the actual divisions and departments, and procurement.

C) Database solution

Throughout finance departments there are a significant number of spreadsheets utilized prior to input into the financial system. There is a tendency to transfer information manually from one spreadsheet to another to meet the needs of different teams.

Replacing the spreadsheets with a database solution would rationalize the number of inputs and lead to effort savings for the front line Police Officers as well as Police Staff.

D) Customize reports

In obtaining management information from the financial systems, police staff run a series of reports, import these into excel, use lookups to match the data and implement pivots to illustrate the data as required. There is significant manual effort that is involved in carrying out this work. Through customizing reports the outputs from the financial system can be set up to provide the data in the formats required through the click of a button. This would have the benefit of reduced effort and improved motivation for team members that previously carried out these mundane tasks.

In designing, procuring and implementing new technology enabling tools, a Police Force will face a number of challenges including investment approval; IT capacity; capability; and procurement.

These challenges can be mitigated through partnering with a third party service company with whom the investment can be shared, the skills can be provided and the procurement cycle can be minimized.

Conclusion

It is clear that cultural, process and technology change is required if police forces are to deliver both sustainable efficiencies and high quality services. In an environment where for the first time forces face real cash deficits and face having to reduce police officer and support staff numbers whilst maintaining current performance levels the current finance delivery models requires new thinking.

While there a number of barriers to be overcome in achieving a best in class finance function, it won’t be long before such a decision becomes mandatory. Those who are ahead of the curve will inevitably find themselves in a stronger position.

Northern Michigan Exciting Travel and Vacation Ideas on a Budget

Northern Michigan is the perfect travel and vacation destination with something to offer for everyone: Golfing, fishing, hiking, boating and other water activities to name just a few. With so much to offer and so much to see, making your vacation plans could be complicated, and with travel expenses and the price of gas higher than in more recent years, getting the most for your vacation dollar is important.Choose Boyne FallsMaking Boyne Falls, Michigan your travel and vacation destination will give you and your family more things to see and do in Northern Michigan and save money.o    Boyne Falls is centrally located to hundreds of the most popular vacationing activities.o    Only 6 miles from Lake Charlevoix, offering free boat launching, with plenty of free parking right on the lake.o    Minutes away from shopping, and dinning choices offering tasty burgers to exquisite fine dinning.o    Only 50 miles away from the Mackinaw Bridge.o    Home to the Annual Polish Festival held the First week of August.o    Boyne City Morel Mushroom festival.o    Close to dozens of Northern Michigan wineries.o    Enjoy golfing on some of the most popular courses in all of Michigan.o    Access to hiking, biking, fishing and almost endless possibilities of other fun and exciting things to see and do.The winter season is just as exciting and popular for your next vacation plan as well. Boyne Falls is located right next to Boyne Mountain and less than 30 minutes away from Nub’s Nob, and many other exciting snow skiing and winter sports locations. There is even hundreds of miles of action packed snowmobile trails that start in the Boyne Falls area.Comfortable Inexpensive LodgingThe focus of your vacation is going out and doing and seeing things, and the cost of lodging shouldn’t be a burden to your budget. By staying in Boyne Falls you can save hundreds of dollars on lodging, and get all of the creature comforts that those higher prices hotel chains offer at almost double the price. There are many local motels in the area that offer the same amenities as the more higher prices hotel and motel chains, but change up 60% less, and with savings like that you put that money back in your pocket where it belongs and have more money available to see and do more on your vacation!The bottom line in planning your vacation is to get the most value for your money and open up your options for sightseeing, and just having more fun, and Boyne Falls can make all of that a reality for less money and offering more fun all at the same time!o    3 airports super close, with one right in town, one 6 miles away in Boyne City, and Pellston Regional Airport only 35 miles away serving many major airlines companies.o    Access to local rental cars, boats, jet skis, bicycles.o    A large variety of shops and stores for your convenience.o    Perfectly located to all of the areas more popular tourist, and sightseeing attractions.There is truly something for everyone in Boyne Falls. Isn’t it time you vacationed in Boyne Falls Michigan?

Payday Loans, Quick And Effective

Do you need cash quick? Are you going through a financial bind? Well there are may different solutions out there for you. You can cut some other costs around the house to be able to get some cash. You could always sell something around the house that you haven’t been using lately too. If you don’t get too embarrassed you could get a loan from a family or friend.These are all possible solutions for you. For some people these are all great solutions. For others, they may need the cash more urgently and don’t have friends and family to get cash from. In this case then you may wish to get involved with payday loans.Payday loans are a great solution for many financial problems that you may face. The way it works is that you can get a quick loan of around 200 dollars to a thousand dollars within minutes. Very little information and things are required. There is no long sheets of paper to fill out with tons of information either.Its simple, they simply need your basic information (telephone number, address) which takes minutes to complete. As long as you are at least 18 years of age you qualify for these loans. Cash can be in your hand in minutes!These loans are especially useful if you are in a stressful situation. Something that could be stressful might be a car accident where you need a new car soon or possibly some medical expenses. Or maybe you simply need some extra cash to get you by until your next pay check.Whatever the case may be, these loans definitely come in handy. After you fill in the basic information needed you will be able to get your cash within 24 hours time! Now imagine if you were to go to a bank for this. If you went to a bank then you would need to fill out mounds of paperwork. They will do a long credit check to see if you qualify and maybe they wont even want to lend you such a small amount of money. In the end you may not even qualify for the loan.After you have the cash in hand you will just need to make sure that you pay it all back about one month later. If you are looking to save time as much as you can you can try payday loans online. You can get instant payday loans just as easy online as you would in person. Except you won’t have to leave the convenience of your own home. If you have bad credit then don’t worry, bad credit loans are not a problem for payday lenders such as Moneytree and cheque to cashIf you were to do it online you could even get the cash directly deposited into your bank account. This is called savings account payday loans. This can come in real handy if you are not able to leave your home. More and more people are doing their loans online now because of its high convenience. Don’t worry about leaving your home because you can get it all online now.There are numerous reasons why you should consider getting the right payday loan for you. The payday lenders can be very flexible if you are needing some extra help. Don’t worry about so much regulations and forms to fill out like you would have to at a bank. You can work with the payday loans members to get the right plan for you. It is called a payday loan because you get the loan and it is designed for you to pay back after your next payday. So, all in all this is the process.You go down to a payday loan service or go online. Fill out about 2 minutes worth of basic documents which only require that you have a job and are 18 years of age. After the papers are filled out you can get the cash within 24 hours. The members are nice and helpful and will help you get started. Just tell them the problem and they will help you work out something. It’s that simple. Learn more about it all now and overcome your financial hurdles!