Helping Your Officers Manage Their Equipment to Improve Your Department’s Asset Tracking

Your police department uses many moving parts. Each officer has a slew of equipment they use in their everyday tasks. Regardless of which division each officer works in, all of them have different tools and assets they rely on to create reports, process information, and support the city.

If you don’t currently have an asset management program in your department that involves all of your officers and support staff, there are steps you can take to implement one.

Start By Creating an Asset Management Program

Before you can start teaching your employees how to track their equipment, you need to have an asset management program in place.

There are many reasons to create an asset management process. If you don’t currently have one, it might seem like a tremendous amount of effort to set up at the beginning. However, the amount of work you put into creating the program will save your department tens, if not hundreds, of hours of work overall.

Creating an asset management program for your department or division involves the following steps.

• Taking inventory of what you currently have
• Implementing a tracking system
• Organizing your assets in a way that’s easy to access
• Utilizing the tracking system daily
• Creating a database to store information and track patterns

Store All of Your Asset Information on a Centralized Database

Most of the work that comes from starting an asset management program is from generating and organizing all of your asset information. If you don’t have a good way of storing that data, then it won’t do you any good to collect it.

Before you can create your database, you need a program designed to work around your department. While there might be something out there explicitly created for police departments, there’s no guarantee that it will complement the way your department does things.

It’s best to search for a customizable solution like Asset Panda that can be changed to include all of the features your team needs to track your equipment efficiently.

Once you have a cloud-based system, then it’s time to organize things in a way that makes sense for your department. If you already have a method that works for you and your officers, then feel free to use that.

If you don’t have one already in place, you’ll need to create one. A system that makes sense for the way things are structured is to tie things to officers and usage. Create a branching asset tracking system where officers are under their commanders. Assign specific equipment to individual teams and then track who on that team is using it.

Bring All of Your Employees into the Program

Once you have an organizational system in place, then it’s time to bring everyone into the program.

The best way to do this is to host a training. Show your officers and support staff how to use the database you’ve set up, and how they can use it to make their equipment tracking more beneficial. Educate them on how you’ve set up your system, why it’s structured that way, and how they can help your department keep that system in place.

Create ways for them to log into the system no matter where they are, and then teach them how to record what they’ve used. There’s no such thing as too much information. It’s better to have more than you can use than for you to lack data your department needs to make changes and improve for the better.