Development Services Review. Final Report. Zucker July 2016

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.

Morgan Hill, California

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Zucker Systems