Case Study: South Australia achieves faster, life‑saving emergency response with Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division

Automatic emergency caller location saves valuable time in South Australia

South Australia’s Computer Aided Dispatch (SACAD), which supports the state’s police, fire and ambulance services, struggled to automatically and accurately locate Triple Zero mobile callers (about 78% of calls) and relied on callers’ verbal directions or coarse Push MoLI cell‑tower polygons. To solve this, South Australia engaged Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division to integrate advanced mobile location (AML) services into its CAD system.

Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division deployed AML into SACAD (after ~18 months of testing and a December 2020 rollout), giving automatic smartphone locations accurate to about 5 meters outdoors (25 m indoors) versus several hundred meters previously. The seamless integration required little training, sped dispatcher decisions, streamlined call‑taking and produced measurable life‑saving impact — within days it helped locate and rescue two stranded kayakers — improving emergency response times across South Australia.

South Australia

Vincent Tarzia

Police Minister