Deschutes County, Dynamic Themes

​The highlighted pink points are an example of a Dynamic Theme displaying all scheduled inspections assigned to one of the Deschutes County inspectors for the day.

Deschutes County uses the Accela GIS (AGIS) interface to display their ArcGIS map within the Accela back office software.  Recently, Tim Berg, Applications & Systems Analyst at Deschutes County, configured in AGIS what is known as Dynamic Themes, which is an Accela database query that is a visual display of the records plotted on the map.  Tim configured a Dynamic Theme for each inspector that runs a query to find all inspections assigned to the inspector for the day and then highlights the property on the map.  If you would like more information about how to create or use Dyanmic Themes, you may contact Tim Berg at Deschutes County at 541-330-4648.  Great job, Deschutes County for taking advantage of this helpful Accela functionality!

Randy Scheid, Deschutes County Building Official, responded to a few questions regarding the use of Dynamic Themes:

Question: How has AGIS and Dynamic Themes helped with managing your inspections?

Randy: With the rapid population growth we are experiencing within Deschutes County, new subdivisions are being platted on a regular basis.  This presents a challenge for building inspectors when new roads are created in unfamiliar areas.  By leveraging AGIS and Dynamic Themes, we are able to use a map service to display the location of scheduled inspections using individual color-coded points for each inspection and subsequent building inspector.  By using AGIS, we can immediately see which inspectors are assigned to each requested inspection on a daily basis.  

Our inspections are assigned to inspectors using the auto-assignment toolset provided by Accela, using geographic inspection areas.  Overlaying assigned inspections on a map with an inspection area layer, we can immediately see when an inspection is assigned to an inspector outside of their normal inspection area.  This allows for a rapid visual assessment of the inspector/inspection assignment and the number of inspection stops for each inspector on a given day.  When inspections are resulted, they are dynamically dropped from the map, which allows visual confirmation of the number of inspections that are scheduled on a given day.

Question: Has AGIS sped up the inspection assignment process?

Randy: AGIS has definitely increased the speed and efficiency of the inspection assignment process.  For example, if one building inspector has more inspection stops in their inspection area than a neighboring building inspector, it becomes very easy to visually see, then reassign an inspection to the closest neighboring inspector.  As a day progresses and inspections are resulted, we can always see which scheduled inspections are still un-resulted and can visually redistribute the workload to nearby inspectors.  As our Assistant Building Official says, “They are not my inspections and your inspections, they are our inspections and the work is not done until all inspections are completed and resulted”.

Question: How did you manage inspections prior to Tim developing Dynamic Themes on the map?

Randy: Prior to implementing AGIS, we would copy and paste addresses that had scheduled inspections into google maps to determine where the address was located (this has been incorrect many times!).  We would then reassign the inspection to the inspector assigned to that particular inspection area.  This was a long and tedious process when we were unfamiliar with specific road names.  Now, we are able to use our own map service which provides identical address and parcel data to what we are loading into Accela via our weekly Address, Parcel, Owner (APO) uploads.  Having an efficient and accurate mechanism to display scheduled, but un-resulted inspections has allowed for much more proficient inspection management on a daily basis.