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.

Mother and Baby Skin Care Methods That Work

Beautiful skin is important for every person, because it is what people see when they look at you. Skin care for women is different than that of men and children. In women, their skin care applies differently at different stages in their life. Babies on the other hand have a delicate skin and they require special attention. Baby skin care is the most important part of its entire health. Their skin is gentle and must be well taken care of. Thus, understanding mother and baby skin care methods that work is important in ensuring beautiful skin for both mother and child.Baby’s Skin Care MethodsThere are various baby skin products on the market. These products are special and take good care of baby skin. Baby skin is delicate and so baby clothes must be laundered in special detergent to prevent skin irritation. Care should also be given to the baby’s head, as it is very delicate. Make use of baby shampoo when giving the baby a bath. Natural baby products are the best since they contain no harsh chemicals. Do not expose the baby’s skin to the noon sun as it will burn the baby. However, the morning sun is a good supplement for vitamin D.Mother’s Skin Care MethodsIn order for the mother to have great skin, she must ensure that she limits her salt intake so that she does not suffer water retention. This will lead to her skin becoming bloated. The mother must avoid skin irritations, ingrown hairs and cuts. It is recommended that mothers take a lot of water, at least 8cups a day. Exercise is also recommended if you want to have that beautiful skin. The exercise must be kept regular, so as to tone your skin.Moisturizing the skin is a must. Please make it a habit to moisturize your skin often. Dry skin tends to get sun burnt easily, so moisturize the skin as often as you can. You can also buy moisturizing towels; they are easy to carry and very convenient.Mothers should cleanse their face regularly, especially in the morning and at night before going to bed. If you have oily skin then soap is good for you. There are various moisturizers and cleansers depending on one’s skin type.Gentle exfoliating once a week is also important for mothers.Benefits of the Skin Care Methods- With a good skin care regiment both the mother and baby will have smooth skin that is soft and supple.- Good skin care ensures mother and baby have glowing, radiant skin.- Skin care gives mother and baby firm skin.- Moisturizing prevents sunburn from the UV rays of the sun and replenishes skin.- Cleansing opens up the skin pores and that aids in eliminating skin wastes.- Promotes healthy looking skin.- Scrubbing helps in the exfoliation which gets rid of dead skin cells.It is imperative for the mother to invest in good skin products for herself and the baby. There are many skin care products available on the market with a range of prices. However, it is recommended to invest in good natural products for the baby.

Creating a Cottage Garden From Scratch

As someone who grew up with a love of the outdoors and gardening it was no great surprise that when I was “grown up” and house hunting a good sized garden was high on my list. However, what the estate agent thought was large I thought was tiny.I wanted a good outdoor space to create my ideal cottage garden. I have been gardening and interested in plants for as long as I can remember. A very early memory is being given a packet of polyanthus seeds by my grand mother who helped me sow and nurture them. They grew to a massive size and the story is often recounted by my also garden loving father.As a child I was allocated an area of my fathers garden to look after and grow whatever I wanted. I remember growing a wide range of flowers and having a herb garden. Many of the plants are still thriving today.My father is still a keen gardener although his area of expertise is the lawn. In fact it is an obsession. Being a golfer each blade of grass stands to attention and is manicured throughout the year. Personally I see lawns as wasted planting space.Having graduated from this area in my fathers garden to my own, I was excited rather daunted at the prospect of a blank canvas. I expect there are many gardeners out there who would relish the opportunity to start from scratch.As someone who usually rushes into things, I planned, researched, re planned and mulled many ideas over. What was really essential to me was that the garden had year round interest and the boundaries were hidden. I wanted to create my perfect cottage garden.I have a strong aversion to structure, routine and straight lines in a garden. This aversion also includes soil and boundaries. I like to hide all evidence of garden boundaries so the garden can look as natural as possible. Covering the soil also has the benefit of suppressing weeds. Order, a place for everything and everything in its place is so unnatural and is not my gardening philosophy. Lots of billowing flowers, verticals, garden rooms and year round interest are order of the day.I aim to mimic or imitate nature as far as possible. I simply adore the sight of plants mingling into each other, jostling for position like fans at a rock concert. This way the garden has texture, colour and form throughout the seasons.Evergreen shrubs form the structural back bone of the garden with trees and arches providing height. All shrubs and trees are under planted with spring and summer bulbs and many have clematis growing through them, timed to flower before the leaves unfurl. The snowdrops are the first brave little flowers to emerge about February. I welcome the sight of their delicate flowers which have a delicate honey fragrance. So heart warming in those bitter winter months where little else is brave enough to flower.I am a strong believer that a plant needs to provide interest for more than just one season. This is vital in a small garden. One of my favourite trees the Coral Bark acer, acer sangokaku, has wonderful red stems as its name suggests. This superb tree has the most delicate green leaves in early spring maturing to dark green. Finally in the autumn it erupts into vibrant yellow as it sings autumns finale. For me this tree gets better with age.I must confess that I am a bit of a plantaholic. Buying, planting and sowing are all gardening pleasures. In my garden I have four distinct areas but they are all connected by arches,small paths and subtle nooks between plants. The garden was planned to appear unplanned, a garden to wander and explore. Each are has a slightly different feel but there is year round interest be that from frost on the remnants of last years sunflowers and perennial flowers,spiders webs glinting with dew in autumn with the fireworks of Rudbeckia, Sedum, Echinacea and acer foliage.Spring is glowing with a wide variety of Daffodils,Tulips, Fritillaries and of course the cherry blossom. I adore cherry blossom especially when viewed against a clear blue spring sky.Summer is my favourite time of year. My favourite flowers Sweetpeas are in full bloom. Vases of their sweet fragrance fill most rooms in my house. My other weakness are Roses. My garden is full of Roses, from ramblers to hybrid teas. I use Roses to climb walls,fences,shrubs and trees. I adore fragrant Roses especially if they are climbers or ramblers. There is nothing better in the summer than sitting under an arch of Roses with a glass of wine in the evening soaking up the scent. I also love the shape and form of Roses. From the tight bud to the full open bloom I find them exquisitely beautiful. Roses also fill my home. They also fill a large border outside my house which is planted with spring and summer bulbs. The border billows in high summer with fragrant Aquilegia, Penstemons and Lavender, an essential plant for me in the garden and romance. To me its perfect.My large border is cottage garden heaven. It has no rules, plants are allowed to self seed freely, plants are divided, if something is not working or thriving it is removed as there are so many plants I love its like a games of swapsies. This border has trees for the vertical, evergreen shrubs, lots of bulbs and carpets of flowers from Forget-me-nots in Spring, Aquilegia, Peonies, Sweet Peas, Larkspur, Calendula, Poppies in a variety of colour, Alliums, Nemesia, Lavender, Scabious, Verbascum and Verbena. These flowers are allowed to self seed and thus follow the seasons. I leave the seed heads for birds and insects, the rest germinate and I enjoy the following year. I simply adore my flower borders as its all about feminine pastel shades and whites which simply glow in the evening light.I adore flowers and growing them for the house is such a pleasure. There is no secret to successful growing.Trees are something that I feel are essential in the garden. I have two fruit trees and the rest are ornamental. I have trees for the colour of their bark and trees for Autumn colour. The great thing about trees is that the add instant height and interest. Trees are also fantastic for growing Clematis, Wisteria or Roses through the branches.This year I decided to enter Warminster in Bloom. I entered for fun and won first prize! I was so thrilled that my cottage garden had won despite being only three years old. Lets hope next year the weather doesn’t wreak such havoc on the garden.