The Audit Engine

FDM’s audit engine dramatically reduces the work load of work order dispatchers and takes over the performance of a significant portion of their duties, freeing up time for other activities. It automates the selection of work orders to be audited and the generation of audit work orders based on their business unit’s audit engine configuration. It also automates the management of FSRs’ work statuses based on their level of experience and uses this information to determine what percentage of their work orders to audit.

When you add a new FSR user account to your business unit, FDM automatically sets his or her work status to New for each of the market types (electric, gas, water, and/or telemetry) supported by your business unit. For any market type your business unit does not support, the FSR’s status is automatically set to Not Authorized.

When the FSR completes his or her first work order in a market type, the system switches the FSR’s status to In Training for work orders of that market type. The FSR’s In Training status continues for the number of work days specified by the Training period days settings of the Business Unit Properties view. Each work day during that period, the audit engine automatically generates audit orders for a percentage of the FSR’s completed work orders, which is determined by the Non-production audit % setting. This percentage is typically high—90 to 100 percent. The system only counts as training days those days in which the FSR completes at least one work order.

After the training period has passed, FDM automatically changes the FSR’s work status to Production. At that point, it starts generating audit orders for the FSR’s completed work orders at the percentage specified by the Production audit % setting. This percentage of a Production-status FSR is usually much lower than that of an In Training FSR.

If there is a problem with a Production-status FSR’s performance, you can manually set his or her work status to In Remediation while steps are taken to resolve it. While the FSR’s status remains In Remediation, the audit engine generates audit orders for him or her using the Non-production audit % setting.

You can define the method the audit engine uses to select work orders for auditing through the Audit Engine settings. It can employ either of two methods:

• Random. With this method, the audit engine selects the specified percentage of an FSR’s daily completed work orders at random, without regard to where their work sites are located.
• Clustered. With this method, the audit engine starts with the list of an FSR’s completed work orders for the current day and selects random clusters of work orders in the list for auditing. The number of work orders in each cluster is defined by the Maximum cluster size field.

  The sequence of work orders in an FSR’s completed work order list reflects the sequence in which the FSR completed them. For this reason, the clusters of work orders selected for auditing tend to be for work sites that are geographically close to each other. Audit orders the audit engine generates for them require less travel time to complete.

Itron recommends that you use the audit engine to generate your business unit’s audit work orders and that dispatchers make sure that all audit orders are dispatched and completed on every work day. At any time they can use the Work Orders workbench’s FSR Audit Compliance views to find out who is out of compliance and remedy the situation. For a high-level summary of audit compliance, see the Audit Compliance Summary section under Quality.