Revenue Shield

Overview

The Revenue Shield software solution is the combination of the next version of our CRIMS and RIMS products. The combination of our prosecutions and inspector management solution allow for a single solution for an entire revenue protection department.

The inspector module records and processes an inspectors end of shift information. This is correlated to allow reporting to be run to analyse revenue hotspots. Using this information allows managers to make informed decisions about where and when to deploy their inspector teams.

Using the information stored within the system a penalty fare can be processed directly without the need for out sourcing to a third party. With a customisable work flow, the number of letters and actions can be tweaked to meet your company's penalty fare notice policies.

The prosecutions module of Revenue Shield has been built using the experience gained from nine years of development and maintenance of our CRIMS product. The prosecutions module allows users to manage multiple court cases with ease, increasing their work efficiency.

The mobile solution provides three major functions: reduced data input costs, greater data accuracy and enabling inspectors to perform individual verification offline, removing the requirement for help desk phone calls.

Combining individual verification information with the existing offender database provides instant detail to the inspector about the current individual they are dealing with. This potentially empowers inspections to safely handle individuals who are known to be abusive or violent.

In conjunction with mobile printing this product will eliminate the need for inspectors to carry multiple books, reduce stock costs, reduce the potential for fraudulent inspector behaviour and reduce the overall paperwork required to process penalty fares, MG11s, excess tickets and on the spot fines.

All aspects of an inspectors duty can be recorded from issuing penalty fares to shift summary information. This includes recording working partners, summary information from station barrier checks and train routes, issuing MG11s and excess tickets, number of passengers checked and recording non-revenue protection related work such as customer service, training and court appearances.

Revenue Shield provides the ability to generate all the required documents and stores them digitally so they can be accessed at any time. Using Microsoft Word Templates for the base of documents wording, signatures and branding can easily be changed.

Benefits of Revenue Shield

Benefits to Company

  • Single point of management
  • TOC receives the full amount for a penalty fare notice including any administration charges that are applied
  • Easily track the path of a penalty fare notice from point of issue, through processing and appeals to prosecution all in one system
  • Potential to share non-sensitive data between TOCs operating a mutual cross party agreement
  • Phone costs - No need for inspectors to call a help desk to start the penalty fare notice process or validate the individual's details
  • processing costs - No more per penalty fare notice processing costs
  • Book costs - reduce the cost of penalty fare notice stock by no longer requiring several different pre-printed books
  • Penalty fare notice scheme flexibility (can change details of the penalty fare notice scheme without requiring new stock)
  • Online penalty fare payment processing

Benefits to Management

  • KPI of inspectors/teams/depots/departments
  • Identify revenue protection black sports on a specific service or across the entire network
  • Identify key areas responsible for the highest number of offences
  • Increased shift data accuracy and reduced data entry time

Benefits to Inspectors

  • Verification of individual information can be done offline
  • Detailed information about an individual's behaviour and appearance available to inspector at time of issue
  • Access to repeat offenders previous history
  • Record behaviour traits to protect staff against abusive and violent individuals
  • Reduces time taken to Issue penalty fare notices
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Benefits of Processing PFNs In-house

  • Significant cost savings by processing penalty fare notices in-house
  • 100% of recovered value is kept within the business
  • Call costs associated with verifying an individual address reduced to zero
  • Complete auditing of the penalty fare and prosecution processes
  • Single point of access for the entire revenue process from issue to prosecution
  • Inspectors can verify addresses offline removing the need to have a mobile signal, wait for an operator to be available
  • Near real time data from inspectors: penalty fare notices are automatically uploaded into the system minutes after issue cutting out the need for data entry by office staff
  • Payment can be taken via phone or online once the penalty fare has been uploaded to the system
  • Penalty fare notices do not need to be posted to a third party, reducing the potential for loss
  • In-house management of the penalty fare notice processes, including reminder letters templates and default penalty fare costs etc
  • Ability to store and access correspondence between the TOC and the individual regarding the penalty fare/prosecution
  • No waiting or re-entry of information if penalty fare notice payment has not been received and prosecution is being sought
  • Ability to halt the sending of reminder letters if the individual makes an appeal against the penalty fare notice
  • Recording appearance features of the individual via the mobile device increases accuracy of identification at a later date
  • Quick penalty fare issuing increases inspector safety by reducing potentially contentious incidents from occurring
  • Inspectors can take payment for any outstanding penalty fare notice which hasn't started the prosecutions process
  • Greater flexibility when enforcing penalty fare scheme to ensure good public relations

Croydon Trams Case Study

Background

Croydon Trams revenue protection department is comprised of 20 revenue protection inspectors and 6 back office staff who process the data. The back office staff are split over two locations, a shop and depot, all requiring access to the system through the day to process the data and deal with queries from customers.

Croydon Trams were running an in-house built system named Nemesis. Nemesis was comprised of two applications, a windows mobile 6 application and desktop based application. The revenue protection inspectors entered their duty information onto their mobile device which required docking with a PC at the depot at the end of their shift. The data from their mobile device was the then merged into the Nemesis database. Nemesis's responsibility was to allow users to generate reminder letters and record payments.

Nemesis, whilst functional, contained a number of issues that required constant administration. The synchronisation method between the mobile devices and the Nemesis database caused numerous duplications which had to be managed and removed manually by a database administrator. In addition to this the underlying database lacked strict data integrity rules.

Features that were built into the mobile application also caused issues. Receipt book numbers were required to be downloaded from Nemesis to the device. This meant that an inspector had to issue each receipt in the correct order according to the system, however If the data had not been synchronised correctly this forced inspectors to issue receipts under an incorrect number and edit them later.

The main windows application caused issues when updating. The application used Microsoft's Click Once Installer and required the entire application to be resent over the network. If multiple updates were released in a short timeframe this process had to be completed every time. The update process also happened when the application was started which resulted in the application being offline whilst the update occurred. Nemesis was a distributed application which required deployment of the update to several sites.

One of the daily tasks Nemesis was required to perform was the generation of reminder letters for penalty fares. Reminder letters are meant to be put on hold if the individual appeals against the penalty fare. This did not work correctly and would cause complaints from the individuals if they received a letter informing them the amount owed had been increased.  

How has Revenue Shield helped?

Revenue Shield resolves these problems by taking a different architectural approach. We've provided a hosted web based application which uses internet services to communicate with the mobile devices. This means that information recorded by inspectors is merged into the system in near real time eliminating the need for I.T involvement. The mobile application creates a unique code every time it needs to communicate with the server, this ensures that data is not duplicated and can be audited at a later date.

Web based applications only require to be updated in a single place allowing for a fast and seamless rollout of new features. Updates can also be applied at any time without causing delay to the users of the system.

At the core of Revenue Shield's data processing is a fully customisable workflow management system. This is essentially a list of actions that need to be applied to an item (e.g. the processing of a penalty fare) in a specific order. The system allows the workflow of specific items to be interrupted by certain events (an appeal against a penalty fare). Using a workflow system ensures that your business processes are adhered to at all times, which means no more miss sent reminder letters.

Revenue Shield has been laid out to display as much relevant information as possible to the user to aid them when dealing with queries. Displaying all required information on screen without the need for opening dialogs or changing tabs allows users to deal with telephone enquires swiftly and accurately.

The mobile application has a two way communication allowing penalty fares issued by another inspector to be available to everyone. This means that a full history of penalty fares related to an individual is available to ensure the correct information is recorded when issuing a penalty fare. The individuals appearance can also be recorded to verify the individual if they dispute it at a later date.

Testimonials

"Since the introduction of Revenue Shield we have seen a significant increase in overall reliability compared with our previous system and the transfer of data generated through the use of inspectors' PDAs is much improved. There have been several other benefits including a huge reduction in the use of paper waybills. The production of reminder letters to schedule is greatly improved, names and addresses are now consistently stored in an acceptable format and the system itself is flexible and easy to use. Data can be readily retrieved from the database and above all there is a great comfort in the knowledge that the system is fully supported. A valuable and personal benefit is that in future, I will be spending noticeably less of my working hours identifying and correcting errors which in turn will allow me to produce reports in a more timely manner than has been the case recently." - Ian Sutcliffe, Revenue Protection Manager.

"I'm really impressed, the application is fast and the device is lightweight and now we have a list of penalty fare history and shared individual description we can perform our duties more accurately and the support are friendly and helpful." – David Carmicheal, Revenue Protection Inspector

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