The National Crime Agency (NCA) is the focal point of national and international intelligence sharing in the UK. One of the key activities they oversee is the timely circulation of intelligence to the UK Border Agency (UKBA), the Warnings Index Control Unit (WICU) network and onto the Police National Computer (PNC).

The NCA’s International Crime Bureau (UKICB) manages INTERPOL circulations – Notices and Diffusions, which are international requests for cooperation or alerts allowing law enforcement agencies into EU member countries for which the UK police forces have been utilising since the UK’s exit from the EU, with approximately 36,000 INTERPOL circulations processed annually. Processing INTERPOL circulations was extremely resource-intensive and diverted staff from other core business functions.

CGI deployed an Intelligent Automation (IA) solution for the NCA UKICB to accelerate the consistent and accurate processing, management and sharing of intelligence which enabled the UKICB to redefine processes to make them work better for automation.

The UKICB has used CGI IA to process INTERPOL circulations since 2018 which has allowed for case preparation and management activities to be completed 79% faster than with human workers, saved 28,000 hours of manual processing and an average full-time equivalent (FTE) saving of twenty officers. The next phases of IA will further increase the FTE savings to significantly reduce workloads and enable better risk management of higher volumes of requests.

The CGI and NCA partnership has resulted in the successful implementation of an Intelligent Automation solution to support the expansion of the automation programme, enabling the NCA officers to:

  • Spend more time on valuable intelligence gathering tasks and decision-making than before
  • Remain in control of its automated processes and direct the workforce according to incoming demand
  • Visually see the processes, highlighting bottlenecks and improving efficient workforce management
  • Reassign virtual workers to backlogs which are now cleared in hours rather than days