On June 18, 2012, the five LaPorte County courts and the LaPorte County Clerk’s office began using the Odyssey Case Management System, after a weekend of data conversion. At the close of business on June 15th, JTAC began converting approximately 630,000 cases into Odyssey from the county’s legacy system. With the assistance of help from some of the LaPorte County staff, the work to convert this data began several months prior to go-live. JTAC conducted three weeks of intense training sessions with the court and clerk staff. LaPorte County courts are located in two different locations, LaPorte and Michigan City, with clerks offices in each location as well.
The LaPorte County Adult Probation Department and the LaPorte County Alcohol and Drug Services (LADS) Department began training for Odyssey Supervision on June 18th, the go-live date for the courts and clerk. After one day of training, the departments went live with the application on June 19th. Multiple training sessions were held with the probation and LADS staff, which are located in two different locations in LaPorte and Michigan City. Upon completion of the training, two additional days of go-live support were provided by JTAC staff. In addition to probation, alcohol and drug cases, probation staff who work for the LaPorte County Drug Court Program are also using Odyssey Supervision to help manage their drug court cases. To date, over 700 supervision cases have been created in Odyssey for LaPorte County.
Steve Eyrick, Chief Probation Officer for the LaPorte County Adult Probation Department, commented as to the benefits his department will receive from Odyssey Supervision. “I anticipate that the biggest benefit is communication,” he said. “By communication, I mean that we now will have instant access to any court appearances of our offenders in LaPorte County as well as others. It will also increase our internal communications and efficiencies by being able to have a daily list of appointments, court hearings, etc.; each officer will know what is scheduled for that day. Before Odyssey, court hearing lists were prepared by our secretarial staff and distributed to every officer. We can now free our secretaries’ time to do other pressing tasks. Officers can now schedule follow-up contacts so offenders being released from custody will not fall through the cracks. Efficiency and communication will be the two biggest benefits to LaPorte County, and after having just consolidated, these issues are even more important.”
JTAC thanks all the judges and Clerk Spevak for their hard work toward the implementation of Odyssey. Also, JTAC thanks Mr. Eyrick, as well as Roxann Justus, Program Coordinator for the LaPorte County Alcohol and Drug Services (LADS), for their support and teamwork approach, which helped make the Odyssey Supervision deployment in LaPorte County such a success.
In the coming months, JTAC will be working to deploy Odyssey to Elkhart County and Odyssey Supervision to Greene County and Jennings County probation departments.
