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Morgan Hill, California
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Zucker Systems
and its integration into an interactive voice response system (IVR) will make
reporting of this type of information routine in the future.
65.
Recommendation:
The Building Official should insure the TRAKiT system
will be fully integrated into any future IVR systems so that detailed
inspection activity reports can be readily generated.
One issue that may be contributing to the number of inspections that are not being
performed on the date requested is the way the IVR system is currently configured.
While we are strong proponents of IVR systems, (along with the ability to request an
inspection online), we believe your current IVR system is arbitrarily limiting the
number of inspections that the system will allow to be scheduled per day. The system
is designed to only accept the number of inspections that the Building Official
believes can be reasonably performed based on the number of available Inspectors.
We support this premise as a way to help insure that the daily inspection workload
does not exceed that amount that can be done while still achieving appropriate quality
standards. The difficulty that has arisen is that the system does not currently
differentiate between those types of inspections that can be accomplished easily in a
short amount of time and those other complex and therefore time-consuming
inspections. Currently the Building Inspector Supervisor has the ability to increase the
number of inspections that the IVR system can accept if he is aware that a large
number of simple inspections will be requested. This is a cumbersome manual
operation that provides limited relief. A more appropriate response would be to
establish a basic unit of inspection time and then assign the appropriate number of
units to each inspection based on its anticipated time to complete. A system
configured in this manner would actually assign inspections based on the total
Inspector time available rather than an arbitrary number of inspections. This approach
will help insure the Inspectors time is being used efficiently and would also help
confirm that assignments are being made equitably among the inspectors.
66.
Recommendation:
The Building Inspector Supervisor should utilize
anticipated inspection time as the criteria in the IVR system rather than
the total number of inspections that can be accepted for each day.
Inspector Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) Inquiries
We find that in many situations permit customers must take extraordinary measures to
be available on site when an Inspector is expected to come to perform an inspection.
In fact, we observe that most of the telephone inquiries in the morning are about an
estimated time of arrival (ETA) for the Inspector. We are sensitive to the fact that it
can be difficult to provide a detailed ETA due to the unforeseen problems that can
arise during an Inspector’s typical day. However, providing customers a general range
of times to expect the Inspector on site can provide a very useful guide for customers.