Accenture and Immigration and Customs Enforcement

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) houses a daily average of more than 30,000 detainees in approximately 270 facilities nationwide. This number has grown significantly over the last five years. As the detainee caseload increases, so do the challenges associated with locating, apprehending, detaining and removing these individuals from the United States. Top-line challenges include:

• Cost containment and effective use of limited resources—Apprehending, detaining and removing more detainees with fewer resources while providing newly enhanced detainee care and facilities.

• Transportation—Moving detainees from apprehension locations, to and from court hearings, to and from medical appointments and between detention locations and removal sites.

• Detention—Expanding capacity among service processing centers, detention facilities, and state and local government facilities while staying within limited budgets.

• Health care—Noncompliance with the timeliness of medical evaluations and delayed access to appropriate treatment can result in treatable illnesses going undetected and the spread of infectious diseases inside detention facilities.

• Case management—Continuous knowledge of each detainee’s location is imperative to ensure the safety of detention facility staff and other detainees, as well as to provide external stakeholders and attorneys with essential information for communication with each detainee.

• Data integrity—Loss of data integrity may lead to incorrectly categorizing a detainee’s level.

Border management and public safety agencies from around the world are improving processes and reaping the rewards.

UK: Her Majesty’s Prison Service
Her Majesty’s Prison Service (HMPS) HQ operations account for £155 million, 8.4 percent of the prison service spend in the United Kingdom. The board recognized the need to introduce a rigorous efficiency and value improvement program to produce a 15 percent cut in expenditure and a significant rise in the value HQ provides to the operational arm of the service.

Accenture worked with the HQ team to help plan its change and human performance work, to support specific change projects as well as the project and program management elements of the work. Accenture has developed program and project management tools, working alongside HQ project managers to help them analyze the "as is" situation, benchmark their performance and to design a more efficient operation. Accenture will also support the implementation planning and delivery over the coming months. The work has yielded £20 million in savings and a significant improvement in HQ services to the prison operations.

France: Penitentiary Administration (Direction de l’administration pénitentiaire)
As part of a 2007 strategic audit, the French government discovered that its prison system was facing an unprecedented increase in prisoners by approximately 30 percent into 2012. It also found other challenges including outdated real estate and overcrowding, staff absenteeism and low success rates in rehabilitation. In 2008, Accenture helped the ministry project team analyze the penitentiary administration’s main mission and objectives, evaluating costs and proposing reforms.

By examining processes ranging from forecast modeling of prison population to procurement practices to health management, Accenture was able to identify significant cost savings, including 3 to 8 percent of staffing costs and 3 percent of overall expenditures. In addition, by reassessing prison alternatives, the administration was able to free up prison capacity by 10,000 additional spots. Accenture also identified opportunities for the administration to improve service by closing old, obsolete and expensive prisons and create new prisons of optimum size for operational costs.

The unique challenges associated with an agency’s responsibility to detain and remove unauthorized aliens safely have created many process and cost inefficiencies. By examining the overall system and all components in the system, ICE can speed the process, save money, improve safety and ultimately achieve high performance in enforcement and removal operations.

ICE has many tools at its disposal.  The detainee-tracking process, for example, is a powerful opportunity to improve decision making and effective management oversight within ICE as each detainee is apprehended, transported to the facility, detained, adjudicated and removed from the country.

These actionable tools can accelerate the path to improvement:

Analytics
Predictive analytics should begin long before a detainee is apprehended. These tools can enable ICE to forecast apprehension and detention needs. Analytics can also support the efficient gathering and formalizing of data to build demand models. By better understanding the fluctuating caseload, ICE can better plan its facility requirements, healthcare, food and transportation needs. Analytics also can enhance ICE’s ability to meet detainee tracking requirements, identify emerging tracking issues and assess the success of the overall detainee-tracking process.

Case management tools
Better case management tools can equip ICE with intelligence to remove the most dangerous people first. By analyzing data currently collected, ICE can see where the system might be optimized and efficiencies gained. Better case management also helps with forward planning.

Cost optimization
ICE can achieve meaningful savings by eliminating costs that result from redundancies and other operational inefficiencies. Using Lean Six Sigma methodologies, process experts and agency personnel can re-engineer the most inefficient processes, cutting costs associated with transportation, health care and facilities by removing waste and reducing complexity.