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Executive Summary:

The County of Santa Clara’s Parks and Recreation Department streamlined incident process management by partnering with Pulpstream. Park Rangers use the Pulpstream app on their phones to log work activities and file incident reports from the field. The digital incident report triggers custom automations based on the type of incident, guiding the process to completion in a timely fashion. Pulpstream solutions bolster The Santa Clara County’s Parks and Recreation Department’s mission to be more sustainable and efficient.

Use Cases:

• Park Ranger Activity Logging
• Incident Process Management
Results:

• Paperwork deleted from processes
• Organization’s carbon footprint reduced
• Rangers free to file digital documents in the field on cell phones
• Court documents are auto-generated

 

The Customer

The County of Santa Clara is located at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area. The area’s abundant natural beauty led to the formation of one of the largest regional park systems in California. The Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department manages 27 parks that contain more than 52,000 acres of land. The parks include recreational opportunities like scenic lakes, historic views, and hiking trails that renew the human spirit.

The Product

Pulpstream is a software platform that streamlines process management across business units. The platform converts paperwork into digital process management solutions, available on web and mobile. Pulpstream solutions introduce efficiencies that drive growth at enterprise scale. They automate away tedium and dissolve data silos to achieve operational excellence. Customers can easily update solutions when policies, technologies, or workforces change. No coding required.

The Challenge: Preserving Natural Resources While Complying with Reporting Requirements

Park Rangers are active conservators of the natural resources in Santa Clara County. They valiantly hike trails, boat through lakes, and patrol parking lots to make sure that outdoorsy experiences are available for generations. Major activities in the field must be recorded with details, such a start time, a stop time, and a description. If there is an incident, such as a parking lot accident, a boat collision, or a missing person in the park, they file an incident report. This report starts a process of reviews and approvals that goes up and down the supervisor chain until it is resolved. Doing all this on paper was not in sync with the County of Santa Clara’s Sustainability Master Plan. County officials partnered with Pulpstream to optimize the situation.

The Inefficiency: Paperwork Processes For Park Rangers

Before using Pulpstream, Rangers wrote reports on paper in the field, then travelled back to an office to enter the info into a database. Filing an incident report would start a multi-level supervisor review process, which was thoroughly documented to comply with government policies. Any documents that needed to be filed with the court system were manually organized and printed. The amount of paper being used created financial and environmental costs. Being in the heart of Silicon Valley, a supervisor sought a technology solution to make the process more sustainable and environmentally conscious. Pulpstream’s mobile app solution caught their eye. Pulpstream offered the opportunity to digitize the paperwork and complete it on mobile devices, while unifying all records in the cloud.  


Implementation Requirements

Santa Clara County needed a digital process management solution that fit into the workflows that were already familiar to Park Rangers. It needed software that integrated with existing, proprietary web portals and data management systems. Furthermore, it needed to make incident reports easier to file and manage for a workforce that roams through regions without cell service or internet.

Technical Requirements Included: DocuSign, custom incident and activity forms, photo capturing, photo sketching, single sign on, GPS, supervisor review process automations, report generation, and integration with proprietary web portals and data management systems.

In three months, Pulpstream’s solution engineers launched a custom digital process management solution. It lets employees across the organization complete works tasks on any device, any time, anywhere.


The Pulpstream Solution

Park Rangers can create an incident report on their cell phone, even if it is offline. They capture photos of evidence at the scene and attach them to the report without breaking their workflow. They can also sketch helpful info on the photos. For example, if two speed boats collided, the ranger could draw arrows on the photo to show the direction that the boats were traveling.

As soon as an incident report is filed, Pulpstream auto sends the report to a supervisor for review. The supervisor sees the task appear on their dashboard. Whether they approve it, reject it, or ask the ranger for more information, the entire incident management process automatically flows through Pulpstream until resolution. Custom rules on the back end determine who is assigned which task, and its due date. Every touchpoint creates a digital record.

Administrators use these to generate reports for government and law enforcement officials. A digital report can instantly go all the way up the chain of command. But no one needs to remember another password. They simply use their county system login to access Pulpstream, whether that’s on a desktop or mobile device.  


Results

Digitizing activity logs and incident management created unprecedented efficiencies for The Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department. All the Park Rangers use Pulpstream on their phones, which saves trees and centralizes all data in the cloud. Reports no longer need to be printed on paper or organized manually. Process automations guide each incident to the ideal outcome, with digital records that keep everyone accountable.    

To learn how digital process automations could make your business more efficient, contact us for a consultation.