Two Indiana public safety agencies will use a shared Spillman software system to help them improve efficiency and exchange critical data between agency divisions, according to the company.
Daviess County Sheriff Jerry Harbstreit said his agency selected Spillman because it wanted a single software system that could fulfill all of the department's jail, mobile, dispatch, and law records needs.
"We had good equipment, but we couldn't access all of the information needed when out in our cars," Harbstreit said in a release. The agency also struggled to access data from headquarters and share information between divisions, he added.
Once the Daviess County Sheriff's Department goes live with the Spillman system in August, deputies will be able to capture the details of an incident at the scene and complete forms and reports from their laptop computers. The result, Harbstreit said, will be less travel time and more accurate reporting.
"We anticipate that the Spillman system will keep our deputies safer, make their jobs easier, help them work more efficiently, and even help us in our investigative roles to get the job done quicker," he said.
Using Spillman's AVL Mapping module, dispatchers will be able to view the location of deputies and incidents on an electronic map.
"It's a big safety thing for the dispatchers," Harbstreit said. "It gives them the ease of knowing where our deputies are at all times."
The neighboring Greene County Sheriff's Department will share Daviess County's Spillman system, storing data on a server hosted at the Daviess County Sheriff’s Department.
The Spillman software is an eagerly anticipated replacement for the agency's current record management system, which is unsupported by the vendor and makes it difficult for personnel to retrieve the data they need, said Greene County Community Liaison Cheri Campbell.
"The Spillman system has so many plusses—I call it a Disneyland for dispatchers. It's just got all the bells and whistles that we need," Campbell said.
The rural county has a small tax base and is always looking for the "best bang for its dollar," Campbell said. Sharing a system with Daviess County enables them to benefit from state-of-the-art software without having to shoulder the hardware costs associated with having their own system.
Campbell said her agency was impressed by Spillman's financial stability and the fact that it has never been merged or sold. When she and Greene County Sheriff Terry Pierce retire in a few years, Campbell said, they want to leave the county with a public safety software system it can rely on.
"It's our legacy for the department," Campbell said.
When the Daviess County and Greene County agencies go live with their system, they will be among 105 agencies in Indiana and more than 1,000 agencies around the country using Spillman software.