Informed Solutions and the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) further enhance the Mercury mutual aid platform to enable configurable, flexible, end-to-end event management capability across all 43 UK police forces.
The Mercury service, a digital platform for managing and coordinating the policing of events across the UK, has undergone significant enhancement in recent months to increase configurability, flexibility, and usability.
Over the last two years, the platform has been used by forces across the UK to support safe and secure policing of globally significant events, including the COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021 (in collaboration with Police Scotland), the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in 2022 (in collaboration with West Midlands Police), and the State Funeral for Her Majesty The Queen Elizabeth II (in collaboration with the Metropolitan Police).
As the strategic digital services partner for NPoCC, Informed Solutions ensures that NPoCC benefits from innovations in digital technology by continuously delivering new and innovative features to the Mercury platform by applying its Queen’s award-winning InformedTRANSFORM© digital transformation methodology. This method combines best practice agile and DevOps practices with collaborative User-Centred Design techniques to develop and continually improve user experience. At NPoCC, it has enabled powerful planning, logistics, and coordination capabilities to be efficiently leveraged for smaller and more routine events.
This expansion of capability comes as part of a continuous effort to meet NPoCC’s vision to make Mercury the go-to platform for planning and executing effective policing of events. By delivering new features faster, more cost-effectively, with less risk, and to the highest quality, Informed Solutions has realised a raft of operational benefits for NPoCC, the 45 UK police forces, and the 9 Regional Information and Coordination Centres, including:
- An increase in efficiency through streamlining and simplifying user experience, making it easier to create mutual-aid requests for events of different types and sizes
- Improved flexibility and usability to support a wider range of users throughout the UK police sector
- Increased return on existing investment in the platform by enabling planning, logistics and coordination capabilities to be used for a larger number of events.
Commenting on the new enhancements made to the platform Chief Superintendent and Head of NPoCC, Matt Lawler, said:
“Policing events effectively is crucial to public safety and confidence. However, no event is the same and each requires detailed planning to ensure that they are adequately and efficiently resourced. These innovative new capabilities delivered through our partnership with Informed Solutions build on the success of the platform in policing large, complex events such as COP26 and the Commonwealth games, delivering greater functionality to officers managing a range of events, each with their own specific policing requirements.”
Sebastian Uhlig, Managing Consultant, Informed Solutions and member of techUK’s Interoperability in Policing Working Group added:
“The Mercury platform continues to showcase how the intelligent application of technology can enable collaborative policing. We are very proud to be continuing our work with NPoCC to further refine and evolve the capabilities available through the Mercury platform and address the changing needs of the broad range of users across the policing sector. These latest features will facilitate future data sharing and integration, data interoperability, and joined-up analytical forecasting.”