Oracle Permits and Inspections

Meet Allie, Allie is an urban homeowner who recently bought a property in the east side of the City of Innovation. Allie is excited about her new home and has started looking into installing solar panels on her roof in an effort to reduce energy costs - and her carbon footprint.

After conducting a couple of online searches, Allie remembers that her real estate agent mentioned The City of Innovation has a new website that allows citizens to navigate the application process for building permits. The new intuitively designed user experience the city recently rolled out makes applying for a building permit easy for homeowners or contractors - regardless of skill level.

Allie goes to the website which boasts a human-centric design, making it easy for her to navigate the entire permit process. While on the site, Allie takes a quick look at some of the options available to her such as applying for a permit, the ability to view permit activity, how to use the permit guide to help identify which permits are required for a specific type of project, and access to the Explore My City feature which adds a geographical context to navigation and search.

Paired with entire experience is an intellibot that helps guide visitors using real time interactions and conversations on both the website and mobile devices. Since Allie is interested in adding solar panels to her home, she wants to make sure she understands what's involved in obtaining a permit for the project. She remembers that one of her neighbors recently completed a similar project and she is able to look up her neighbor's permit information to make an informed decision.

The City of Innovation website allows Allie to search for permit information too. There are many ways to do this, but for Allie the easiest option is to provide her neighbor's address. The bot returns results showing two existing permits: a permit for a residential addition and another for a solar project.

Next, the website presents Allie with summary information about the two permits. Some of the additional information includes the type of permit obtained, the status of the permit, the identity of the applicant and the permit fee paid. Allie can continue to drill down for more details but she has the information she needs to start her application.

The City of Innovation's Community Development solution employs Oracle Policy Automation to provide a guided online experience for its users. For Allie, this means all she needs to do is complete a guided questionnaire that will help remove the complexity around determining which permits are required for a construction project.

For the agency, this saves processing time by making sure the right application type is submitted for the intended project and eliminating the need to ask contractors or property owners to submit a new application in order to capture the required information. Because the agency has configured the system to define questions to reflect the permit type and associated requirements Allie needs to kick start her solar panel project, she is able to complete the questionnaire quickly and accurately.

Leveraging Oracle's Community Development solution, the City of Innovation's website also includes a pervasive use of maps using Esri geographic information system (GIS). Allie loves this feature because she can simply enter her neighbor's address into the search box and the results return a map marker with the number of permits at that location. Allie (or a contractor she hires) can also zoom in or out to consider the geography around a particular location. Clicking on the map marker shows that this location has two permits: one for a residential addition and another for solar. Allie can also select Go in order to view more information about the permit in a new browser window.

Allie is all set with regard to understanding permit requirements for her solar project. Like many homeowners, she has a few other home improvement projects on her list that might require a permit. Therefore, Allie decides to use a search capability that allows her to look for the information by permit type. Defined by the agency, permit types can be grouped in ways that meet their needs, such as residential, commercial or environmental permit categories, and in ways that allow constituents to look them up with ease. In this case, Allie searches for additional information regarding permits for fencing and decking projects.

Now that Allie has found the information she needs, it's time for her to apply for the permit. Allie is presented with a clean, modern, online application to supply the necessary information for her project. She is able to navigate the pages easily by utilizing the drop down menu in the top center of the page that informs her of the different sections in the application. In this example, the third page captures the solar details or construction project information for Allie.

When Allie submits her permit application, it is automatically routed to a queue to be reviewed by agency staff. The Agency Springboard is where agency employees start their day. From there they can access quick actions, page links, and task panels for managing the daily workload. Agency pages are role-based, providing staff members access to information and pages based on the security privileges assigned to them. The task panel includes 'My Tasks', which can be considered the agency staff member’s to-do list. Selecting 'My Tasks' provides a quick-start way to navigate to a staff member's assignments. This staff person has 22 task to review.

Allie's permit application follows an automated workflow that is easily configured for this permit type. Workflow steps can be automated or require intervention from agency staff; steps can include plan review, permit issuance, and final inspection. Departments can review permit applications concurrently, add comments, and make a determination whether the proposed work is in accordance with agency regulations and building codes. Once the assigned departments have completed their review, an assigned employee enters a final determination for the overall review. The application gets routed automatically to pre-defined reviewers ensuring all processes are adhered to and met.

Now that Allie's permit is being processed, let's take some time to better understand how the City of Innovation transformed their permit operations. Meet Joan, Joan is a permit technician who has been using the Oracle Community Development solution to simplify the permit process and improve efficiency across the agency and for its constituents.

Joan is able to configure a permit application very quickly and easily, the permit designer enables her to quickly define the intake application. The top part of the page defines the permit type - in this case it is a building permit that is already in use. Joan likes that the system contains all the common data elements an agency may want to capture from an applicant for a particular type of permit. Joan can drag and drop predetermined elements onto a page and then make changes to labels, the display, and add pages or custom fields to meet the needs of the agency, making the design process straightforward for Joan and other business analysts.

Let's take a closer look at the functional backbone of Oracle's Community Development solution and where Joan easily defines and modifies permit processes. Joan can leverage any of the multiple pre-built processes as-is or tailor to her agency's specific needs. Joan really likes how user friendly the system is and especially likes the drag and drop features that allow her to rapidly build or modify the workflow behind a specific or multiple permits. This is the process definition for a solar permit that Allie submitted earlier.

Additionally, the system uses an intuitive swim lane interface which is common for managing handoffs between the roles. Each swim lane is assigned to the step. Green boxes are human tasks, blue tasks are system events - and all of this ensures Allie's permit gets processed as efficiently and quickly as possible.

Allie's solar installation project went off without any delays. Now that her project has progressed to an inspection step, the installer/contractor can schedule an inspection online. Oracle's Community Development solution includes the Oracle Inspector App, which has been purpose-built to support building inspectors like Greg. Because Greg is typically in the field there's great value in him being able to start his day directly from the application without having to go to the office. The list displayed shows the 'My Inspection' tasks which includes a visit to Allie's house.

From the job list, Greg can quickly update his estimated time of arrival (ETA) to let others know if he'll arrive early or be late to an appointment. Greg can update his work schedule, reassign appointments when needed, or claim assignments all from the app. Once onsite, Greg can access the agency-defined and inspection-specific checklist to perform his review. Agencies can define checklists as pass or fail, or they can configure more complex scoring as circumstances demand. Greg can further document his inspected work by adding comments, or uploading photos and videos to the checklist item. Once all checklist items are complete and required signatures captured from the inspector and contractor, the inspection is ready to be submitted.

Now that Allie's permit application has progressed through all of the defined workflow steps and the inspection process, the final permit is ready to be issued. Once the ''Issue Permit''step is marked complete, the permit is printed. Oracle's Community Development solution uses Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher to create pixel-perfect reports for Agency use, including the permit card which is issued to Allie.

In summary, Oracle's Community Development solution is a new cloud solution purpose-built for state and local government. The solution helps government address requirements for community development services and functions of the permit lifecycle in a way that is reliable, extensible, easy to use, and future ready with Oracle Cloud’s capabilities and the latest technology innovations.

With the Oracle Cloud, you get more than the latest technology; you're investing in a roadmap - a vision that provides the business flexibility you need to innovate for today and tomorrow.