The management and response to logged incidents in urban areas could receive a boost with TakeAction, a service-focused smartphone app for the public to log service delivery requests for action by service providers.
Solution House Software, a Cape-based provider of a national urban management and public safety and security solutions, has developed its Incident Desk system with the general aimed of improving urban management in South Africa.
These urban management activities and incidents range from crime, crime prevention, municipal services, medical emergencies, traffic and car accidents, management of estate developments and facilities management.
Incident Desk, recently deployed by office, retail, residential and leisure hub Century City, is being rolled out countrywide. With more than a 250 000 activities and incidents logged on the system, it is arguably the largest private urban management system in South Africa.
Solution House Software CEO, Tiaan Janse van Rensburg, says that with Incident Desk and the linked TakeAction app the main aim is for prompt service delivery and the real-time electronic logging of all kinds of activities and incidents in an area.
“TakeAction is actually more than just a smart phone app, but a service eco-system. With it incidents are sourced from numerous entities – the public, security service providers, improvement districts, neighbourhood watch initiative, CPFs, security estates etc. It centralises al incidents in one solution in real-time for service providers to act on.
“It removes islands of data while providing each entity or service providers with numerous tools to better manage their environment. We provide detailed reports and trending, such as hotspots mapping, time-of-day and day-of-week crime pattern analysis and will soon start with our machine learning and basic artificial intelligence (AI) initiative, which will add predictive crime analysis.
“The system has been active for about two years, in which time most of the improvement districts in the Western Cape have subscribed to our service,” says Janse van Rensburg.
TakeAction routes a request or incident with a GPS location and category type and provides the service provider with a cloud-based, enterprise-level incident management back-end to manage, respond to and report on the incident.
The incident types are managed centrally based on industry standards and includes categories such as municipal services, by-laws, crime, medical emergencies, traffic and accidents.
The system includes a national location-based SMS number provided by CellFind. The number can be used by the service provider and will route a SMS to the correct service provider, depending on the location from where the message was sent. The service provider can also provide an email address, which the public can use to log calls.
“All these communication methods provides a one-stop solution and will be automatically routed and logged on the system from where the service provider can manage the calls,” says Janse van Rensburg.
“Even before the launch of our public facing solution, the TakeAction system was already being used by many central improvement districts, neighbourhood watch initiatives and security companies throughout South Africa.
“Over 600 incident types are already being administered on TakeAction and we are currently expanding the solution to security estates and real-time alarming from devices and Internet-of-things (IOT),” he adds.
“Our goal is for TakeAction is to help the public and be used for almost any kind of service request anywhere in the world; and to make life simpler for the service provider while reducing the cost of providing the service,” says Janse van Rensburg.
