Off Duty Blue Depends On PDFfiller to Facilitate Contracting Processes

Who?

Off Duty Blue helps provide police protection for private companies, especially construction sites. Working closely with local police departments, Off Duty Blue helps facilitate secondary employment and hiring for special events for current police officers looking to work extra hours.

Based in Syracuse, New York, Off Duty Blue has connected with half a dozen police departments and contracts 35 officers, a figure that they’re looking to multiply to about 400 as they expand down the entire east coast. Though a new company, Off Duty Blue is already providing about 1,000 hours a month of services and in the coming months expects to see that rise to about 6,000.

Off Duty Blue is a security logistics solution that allows clients to easily request security details, officers to find work that fits their schedule, and departments to manage their workforce.

www.offdutyblue.com

The Problem

Off Duty Blue occupies a niche in the market previously filled by mid-level management, desk calendars, and paper permission slips. When Jim Raschella and his two partners created the company, they saw a hole in the market in which a digital service could be an effective solution, but they knew that there would be a number of component parts to be integrated before they could satisfy it. “When we first conceptualized this idea, part of the value proposition was automated payment, so we always knew we needed [PDFfiller’s] capability, we just didn’t know how to get that capability…” said Raschella. A digital document management solution was going to need to be an integral part of Off Duty Blue.

The paper solution was impractical for both police officers and departments. With paper-based scheduling and approval forms, documents can have to “hit four or five people before it gets approved… as well as a signature from the client themself. So one of the things officers were having to do on their day off was driving these pieces of paper all over the place to get them signed by their chain of command as well as the employer. That’s actually where we started looking for a more efficient way to handle that process for them.”

“What we’ve done is turn that bulletin board into digital software that can be used on any device,” said Raschella. To do that, Off Duty Blue needed PDFfiller.

80% of the hours worked nationwide are dealt with paper-based solutions, Raschella claimed, so streamlining this was critical for Off Duty Blue and provided huge scope to improve the efficiency of police departments.

“Our platform does a great job of streamlining the requests, approvals, assignments, and processing the officer’s payments, but permits vary by department. We quickly realized that all the digital features were useless if we get stuck waiting on paper, so we started to explore different applications that could help us digitalize that process as well.” said Raschella. After Off Duty Blue tried another service, “we found PDFfiller, [a solution] that’s half the price and works twice as well,” said Jim Raschella.

The Solution

Off Duty Blue will be relying on PDFfiller on a daily basis to streamline their hiring and record keeping processes.

PDFfiller makes the process faster, easier, and ensures better business practices.

“Two of our goals when starting this company were to simplify the process of detail scheduling and to protect officers and departments by keeping better records,” said Raschella.

Fortunately for Off Duty Blue, “PDFfiller helps us take a permit process that used to take hours or days and reduce it to minutes. More importantly, having a digital version of the permit with timestamped signatures that can be reviewed and audited at a later date keeps everything transparent and improves accountability.”

Permits can easily be uploaded to PDFfiller and made completely fillable using the proprietary fillable fields drag and drop wizard. PDFs are completely editable on PDFfiller’s web platform from any internet-connected device anywhere, anytime.

Adding security staff is easier now that PDFfiller has been integrated into Off Duty Blue’s digital solution. Through both the API and the web app, PDFfiller makes it easy to edit, complete, sign, send, and store digital documents.

Using proprietary features like PDFfiller’s “SendToSign”, Off Duty Blue can distribute forms across multiple offices instantly. SendToSign even allows officers to forward the document on to the next supervisor to sign automatically, meaning officers can complete their paperwork in minutes rather than hours. And a digital file stored on secure servers is always available and can never get lost or accidentally thrown away; an audit trail and revision history means users can see what’s been changed.

Using PDFfiller is so easy that “Not once has a document gone unsigned. I’ve had zero issues to date,” Raschella said.

Working in law enforcement means that Raschella needs to be particularly concerned about security; PDFfiller ensures that Off Duty Blue and the officers and police departments the company works with, are always protected.

“Am I going to have a good answer for the chief of police when he asks how safe his officers’ social security numbers are?” Raschella asked himself before choosing a digital solution. PDFfiller has redundant backups and relies on Amazon’s ultra-secure and always-available S3 servers to make sure documents are always protected and always available. For Off Duty Blue, using PDFfiller also allows the company to keep their documents off-site, which minimizes their liability. Two-factor authentication and encrypted, PIN-protected document folders add another layer of security. “Security is always important to us, so that was one of the main [benefits of PDFfiller also], said Raschella.

Conclusion

PDFfiller makes Off Duty Blue’s digital contracting and scheduling possible by providing a digital document solution.

“PDFfiller is an awesome tool for anyone in business, but for our business, where accountability is everything, it’s a lifesaver,” said Raschella. “PDFfiller’s [features] are a lifesaver for us.”

PDFfiller helps Off Duty Blue effectively serve a growing list of police departments. “It’s saving time and producing better records and those are two of our main objectives,” said Raschella.

Ultimately, by facilitating the exchange of documents and making it easier to add signatures and notes completely digitally, PDFfiller allows police departments to streamline officers’ secondary employment and makes Off Duty Blue’s digital employment solution possible.

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