With nearly 5,500 employees and contractors, the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) Child Welfare department protects children who are victims of abuse or neglect and strengthens families through services which focus on family support and preservation.
All that care requires a lot of interaction – with families, with other agencies and between employees. When COVID-19 changed the landscape of work, it impacted DCS in many more ways. If workers can’t interact with families, they can’t do their jobs. The department needed to figure out how to keep its employees safe while carrying out its mission.
Using Salesforce and MuleSoft, DCS and Revelant were able to quickly create tools to meet safety and social distancing requirements. For those who work in or visit DCS offices, the department and Revelant created an app which calculates the maximum number of people an office space can safely hold while maintaining social distancing guidelines. The capacity number is unique to each county as it’s determined based on the size of the office and spacing of desks.
To ensure these guidelines are being met, the application provides a way for front desk personnel, or in some offices, by employees/visitors themselves, the ability to check in and out of the office, making visible to everyone the occupancy and safety status at any moment. Employees in the database are already known through integration with other systems, and the app can handle visitors as well, including capturing contact information in case a need arises for follow up.
Future visitors can be entered in a calendaring system for capacity planning, while the app works on desktops or mobile devices for maximum accessibility. A dashboard provides at-a-glance insight into compliance across all of Indiana’s 92 counties. To deploy, a short training video and conference call rolled out the app to the county offices, highlighting with the flexibility to work in their unique location.
From idea inception to delivery, DCS and Revelant pivoted to make this app a reality very quickly, allowing the department to continue serving its population as quickly as possible in a time of great uncertainty.
