ArcLogistics Helps Inspectors

Housing Authority of the County of Cook, Cook County, Illinois

It is a word problem that would make any math student blink. How do you schedule more than 25,000 inspections per year in the most efficient manner while avoiding multiple trips to the same building or street for different tenants? Until recently, the solution to this conundrum involved a great deal of time, frustration, and highlighters for the Housing Authority of the County of Cook (HACC).

Dwight Fenderson of the HACC, says, "Supervisors would scan down reports of inspections with a ruler and a highlighter and highlight related houses, then manually assign these inspections to their staff. It was an extremely tedious job for supervisors when we had so many other things we needed them to do."

HACC is responsible for the entire area of Cook County outside the city of Chicago and operates a Housing Choice Voucher rental subsidy program for low- and moderate-income families. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires that each of these units be inspected before they come under lease and annually thereafter. Complaint inspections and random quality control inspections must also be performed. With 13,000 active units, HACC needed a clearer way to track units that had failed inspections and required follow-up. "A lot of these units fail the initial inspection, so we have to go back sometimes two or three times before we can approve them," adds Fenderson.

To untangle the task of organizing and cataloging these inspections, HACC implemented ArcLogistics to automate inspection routing. "I think we achieved what we set out to do," continues Fenderson. "Each inspector does 33 percent more inspections, mileage payments have dropped by at least this amount, and in one-half hour supervisors can schedule inspections that previously would have taken them most of the day."