It’s hard enough to manage and report on case investigations without having to fight against your software. While there’s no case management software that can make your job easy, there are many that can make your job less difficult. There are two types of agencies that can benefit most from taking a look at current software offerings: agencies using an outdated custom-built system, and agencies relying on shared folders, Excel, or other solutions not designed for case management at all.

Signs your Custom-Built Case Management System is Holding You Back
If you’re using an outdated but customized piece of software, it was designed to meet your needs years ago but is likely holding you back in several different ways. If your tasks or workflow have changed since the software was first installed, it may be expensive or difficult to find someone to update the product. Exporting data into a useful format can be difficult. The interface is probably not at all familiar to new employees, and it won’t be intuitive to anyone accustomed to using modern apps. It probably doesn’t have version tracking either – this makes it much more difficult to ensure that you’re always viewing or updating the most recent information from any given case.

floppy

Each of these things are annoying but won’t rise to the top of your list of problems. But taken together, your software could be one of the largest challenges to your team’s efficiency. If your software isn’t responding instantly to your search queries, it will cost your team hundreds of work hours over the course of the year. When you consider all of the time taken by team members to manually distribute tasks that should be done automatically as cases progress from phase to phase, that also quickly adds up. And if your agency is mandated to report activities and results to an oversight agency, you probably know how time consuming it can be to compile those statistics manually.

Signs That It’s Time For Your Agency To Invest in a Focused Case Management System

If you’re using shared folders and Excel to manage and report on cases, your workflow isn’t addressed at all by your software.  Here are a few of the problems we’ve encountered at agencies using this approach:

  • It’s a major impediment for only one person to be able to edit a file at a time, especially for files used to track the status of multiple cases.
  • Your software probably isn’t automatically keeping track of the time taken to move cases from one stage to another, and it’s not notifying you when cases haven’t been touched in a while, or are stuck waiting on input from an outside party.
  • It’s not notifying you that required tasks haven’t been completed when you progress to the next stage.
  • It’s not exporting these statistics into a preformatted report template which you can use to report on your team’s success.
  • Perhaps most importantly, as your team’s caseload continues to grow, your software isn’t configured to help make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and it can’t be configured to help you with these things.

If either of these situations sounds like your agency, call us at 919-600-5102 or email kevin.doepp@wingswept.com and we’ll be happy to discuss what an updated system can do for your agency.