Greater Together uses Incident Desk for KZN community safety initiatives

After the devastation of the July 2021 KwaZulu-Natal riots, the Greater Together Foundation (GTF) was founded to build secure, stable and sustainable communities together.

A year on, its founders have found and tested the best platform for the fulfilment of their vision – My Incident Desk from Solution House Software.

And in the process, they’ve managed to significantly broaden the scope of the market-leading platform, from catering purely for service and incident management to also overseeing social services and disaster management.

The dream

GTF believes that South Africa’s community safety concerns are so great that they can only be overcome by effective communication between key role-players accompanied by a collaboration of resources and, more importantly, a co-ordination of effort that reduces duplication and increases our reach.

In addition to this, GTF states: “Private citizens and businesses have an urgent role to play in supporting our democracy.” Furthermore, “in order to succeed in KZN, we needed more than that. We needed a replicable model for safer, healthier communities that could be used to drive positive change in our nation, which is crying out for transformation.”

To that end, GTF runs a centre in Durban for co-ordinating community safety and security initiatives and humanitarian aid programmes. This can only be achieved through strong partnerships with SAPS, security companies, neighbourhood watch initiatives, Metro Police, Fire & Emergency Medical Services, community policing forums, humanitarian aid organisations, and, most importantly, the community at large.

To enable the co-ordination of their activities, GTF required a platform that could be shared by service providers, humanitarian aid partners, security companies and city management to co-ordinate incident reports, service requests, callouts, capacity and the management of target areas.

The solution

Enter Incident Desk, a cloud-based incident and service management platform developed by Cape Town-based Solution House Software.

Tiaan Janse van Rensburg, Commercial Director, says Incident Desk is cloud-based, enabling numerous partners to take up shared occupancy of one secure online platform, quickly and easily, without the need for complicated software installation.

The platform’s no-code, component-based architecture allows Solution House to rapidly develop and deploy desktop and smartphone app solutions for the platform’s “tenants”, catering to their needs without any coding knowledge.

“As a result, GTF can easily manage a diverse set-up of incident categories and services and provide focused crime intelligence,” he says.

Features

Incident Desk comes preconfigured with over 2 000 service categories that urban and public safety managers can pick from to manage a specific precinct or area.

These include municipal services, maintenance management, by-laws enforcement, emergency incident management, complaints and operations, traffic management, social services and homeless people management.

In addition, Incident Desk comes with many integrated tools that support better service delivery:

• Mapping and geofencing of municipal wards allow service teams to be routed to the precise location;
• Live location tracking of service calls and teams allows for more efficient dispatch of mobile workers and guards and can also be used by Metro Police and emergency teams;
• A mobile asset management module enables easy loading of vehicles and other assets for daily and other scheduled check-ups;
• A homeless people management function integrates a POPIA-compliant facial recognition solution to assist the most vulnerable of society more efficiently; and
• Broadcast push notifications can be sent to smartphone app users, who can in turn report issues via a mobile app (cheaper than SMS), facilitating announcements and two-way comms around service delivery and outages.

Proven efficiencies

Janse van Rensburg says Incident Desk has proven efficiencies benefiting urban service delivery, which is great news for voters and local authorities alike.

The platform is the leading private urban management and public safety platform in SA, with many areas under management in Cape Town, the City of Johannesburg and eThekwini.

But smaller municipalities benefit too.

“Easy, relatively inexpensive and quick to roll out, My Incident Desk allows any municipality to get ahead of the many issues impacting service delivery in a very short time,” Janse van Rensburg concludes.

The future

Soon after the platform was implemented in the region, another disaster in the form of floods hit KZN in April 2022. Solution House quickly added emergency flooding categories to the platform, allowing GTF to efficiently log flooding and damages and notify related parties.

“With Incident Desk’s latest expansion, I think it’s fair to say the platform has the flexibility, scalability and rapid roll-out architecture that will see public entities across the board benefiting from it for years to come. We are proud to assist organisations such as the GTF in improving the lives of South Africans,” concludes Janse van Rensburg.