Investigations Management
CANDA understands the criticality of the background investigation mission to our nation’s security. We bring wealth of experience in conducting background investigations on the national scale, and expanding critical functions necessary to fulfill DCSA mission - securing the trustworthiness and integrity of the U.S. Government’s workforce. We are proud to support DCSA mission and looking to expand innovative Fresh Haystack platform’s digital modernization, BI (Background Investigation) automation and AI capabilities.
Fresh Haystack offers best-practice, preconfigured investigation workflows powered by response plans for Insider Threat, Workplace Violence, and other case types with powerful SLAs, notifications / escalations, task and checklist management for effective and timely case resolution.
At Fresh Haystack, we understand that navigating the complex landscape of enterprise investigations management is a critical factor in achieving sustainable success. Our Investigation Services division, inspired by the spirit of technology innovation, decades of expertise and driven by data-driven insights, are designed to empower your investigations needs in an ever-changing policy and business environment.
Background Investigation
The Fresh Haystack Background Investigations solution is an environment that provides a method to scope an investigation, auto-create leads that are extracted from a myriad of integrated data source inputs (i.e. Criminal, Financial, Social Media) using the proprietary WATO (Work Assignment and Tuning Optimization) algorithm to investigators based on the multiple factors such as geographical location, complexity, cost , schedule, etc. of the lead to be investigated.
During an investigation, the Fresh Haystack Investigators Portal provides an environment for the Background Investigator (BI) to to upload individual investigative artifacts, complete leads, and auto generate editable Reports of Investigation (ROI). Flexibility is built into the environment so the queue of investigation leads can be managed in a way to prevent investigator overload, but control and/or redirect investigations to alternate investigators based on investigative performance, case workload, case complexity, geography, etc.
This method and structure of Investigations Management allows the entire investigative workload of cases to be distributed across multiple Investigators in any manner deemed appropriate to ultimately speed up case completion and reduce the cost of each completed BI.
Workflows & Response Plans
While our solution is based on the risk focused case management capability, our solution has been highlighted several times, by industry leaders like Gartner, for its Response Plan functionality. This allows a configuration of Response Plan for each type of risk, whether it is an investigation, insider threat, workplace violence or other incident. The Fresh Haystack applies a known execution plan for response, wraps Service Level Agreements (SLAs) around the steps and can escalate actions if they are not completed on time.
Additionally, our platform combines data collected while at work (cyber activities, physical access, etc.) and data collected from outside of work (integrations with 3rd party data providers for criminal, financial, dark web, OSINT, social media, etc.) with the person’s risk exposure to your organization (aids in the response plan planning). This is combined into a single pane of glass across organization silos, physical facilities, and security programs to ensure a full view of risk in context for an organization.
Investigations Management
Fresh Haystack enables variety of the investigation types: Background, Vetting, Workplace Violence and Insider Threat. All case types are executed based on the preconfigured and benchmarked workflows with notifications / escalations / templates / etc. All of the configurations are easily customizable using our low code capabilities by business users.
The Enterprise Investigations Management is a suite that provides a method to scope an investigation, auto-create leads that are extracted from candidate SF85p / SF86 / PVQ form inputs and additional case criteria, and then auto assign leads based on the proprietary AI WATO (Work Assignment and Tuning Optimization) algorithm to investigators based on the multiple factors such as geographical location of the lead to be investigated, complexity of the case and others. The Investigators Portal allows full-cycle accomplishment of:
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Investigation initiation and assignment – Geography-based
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Investigation Scoping – Auto-scoped based on Tiers 1-5 (or 1-3 for TW2.0)
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Investigator Travel – Minimized travel based on geographical assignment approach
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Investigator Sourcing – Flexible sourcing via controllable queue
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Investigator Assignment – Automated assignment, but with flexibility to manually assign
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Investigator Review and Quality Assurance (QA) – QA checks built into workflow
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Investigation Invoicing – Invoice generation via BI Contractor contract with expectation that invoices will be lower than normal due to geography-based lead assignment approach
AI WATO
AI WATO (Work Assignment and Tuning Optimization) algorithm to investigators based on the multiple factors such as geographical location of the lead to be investigated, complexity, cost, schedule, case type and other parameters to create an effective and optimized work schedule.
WATO is using DID (daily inventory dashboard) information for source and fine tunes the model to meet or exceed the scheduling created in the Workbook (geography and batching). WATO analysis process ensures the model is operating as expected and its continue to learn. Using WATO yields a common scheduling dashboard (Fresh Haystack Portal) and could include key dates/transitions to show a full picture of team performance to all participants necessary across multiple investigative divisions or programs - allowing work items assignments to be based on the variety of multifaceted factors and not just geography.