Solution House adds mobile team tracking, dispatch to live incident management platform

Solution House Software, a market leader in urban management and public safety, has further enhanced Incident Desk, its integrated service management platform, with a mobile team tracking and dispatch module.

Tiaan Janse van Rensburg, Director, says the ability to monitor and send out mobile response teams based on their closeness to trouble spots further rounds out the company’s vision for a fully integrated, real-time smart city management platform.

Necessity breeds innovation

Janse van Rensburg says integrated service and incident management is essential in cities because of ongoing urban migration over time, and the associated problems of congestion, safety and security.

“At the same time, city budgets are under increasing pressure, requiring ever more efficiency in handling crime, disaster and service failure. And to add to these pressures of modern cities, the world has come through a difficult year in which COVID-19 added to cities’ incident response workload.”

To help meet the growing need for sophisticated incident management, Solution House Software recently extended Incident Desk with integrated facial recognition for quick and easy identification of workers, patients and persons of interest, to help fight crime and deliver more effective services.

The latest addition combines mobile tracking and dispatch for the first time, Janse van Rensburg says. “Before, incident management was handled separately from tracking mobile workers, and different types of workers like guards and emergency service personnel were managed separately from each other, making service and incident management unwieldy, slow and error-prone.”

Now, he says, technology-enabled mobile workers like guards can be automatically monitored and dispatched from one system, as they are now part of the overarching incident management platform.

“As a result, emergency services, police and private security firms can quickly log, dispatch and resolve any kind of service request – from a pothole to a vehicle accident to housebreaking.”

Layers of actionable intelligence

He says mobile worker tracking and dispatch enables service providers to view the live location and travel paths of workers.

Overlaid with a live incident map of the area under service management, this functionality allows service providers to view and identify workers closest to the incident, and to allocate and dispatch them with the click of a mouse.

The mobile worker in turn can acknowledge and accept the request on his/her mobile app in real-time and will be routed to the location by the app, which leads to live visibility of teams and increased efficiencies, Janse van Rensburg adds.

The solution also includes the ability to check status of teams – specifically whether they are active, he says. “The smartphone app has a built-in panic button and sign-of-life check function to keep an eye on lone workers or workers operating in dangerous areas."

Lastly, Incident Desk can be used to send live bulk emergency broadcasts to mass response teams or affected groups of people, straight to their mobile smartphone app.

Fully-functional platform

“With our new integrated mobile worker track and dispatch solution, Incident Desk has arrived as a fully-functional smart city service platform,” says Janse van Rensburg.

“Teams no longer have to do the hard work bridging different systems to monitor incidents and teams, dispatch workers and communicate with the public at large.”

And as they say, a connected city is a safe city.