Insights from a Former QAD on Best Practices for Your Providership

It’s no secret that Ekotrope works with a variety of innovative HERS Rating Companies. These partnerships coupled with our RATER software insights have allowed us to better understand certain practices used across the HERS Rating Market.  These innovative techniques, similar to convergent evolution where two species from different continents develop similar traits, have developed across multiple HERS Rating companies and are now quite common. Further, as a former QAD and 3rd Party QA Provider Manager, I have observed and implemented some of the same techniques myself. 

We believe that by sharing these convergent and common practices with you, our industry will become more consistent and will enable better software solutions that support and improve the work of our users.  It will enable raters to provide higher-value services to their builders. 

In this article, I’m going to share a few of the best practices that are common across the country in QA Providerships and offer a few ideas of how they could still be improved. 

New Client Plan Reviews

Rating companies onboard new work by completing a plan review of each new house plan. This practice identifies troublesome orientations, builder design options, & locations that may cause difficulties passing critical thresholds like codes, performance goals, and rebates while also finding low-cost design improvements. This best practice is a critical service but unfortunately, it is often considered the cost of doing business with a new customer. Nevertheless, it is a crucial step in onboarding new customers and helps ensure a successful foundation for their inspection team.

We are working to reduce the time it takes to complete this task and assist our users in turning the time-intensive service into a value-add for themselves as well as their clients. We are working on a tool that quickly allows Raters to determine the impact of various design changes and scenarios - if you’d like to learn more contact info@ekotrope.com. 

Narrowly Defined Field Tasks Supported with Cloud Technology

Many rating companies utilize a scheduler, a field documentation collection tool, and field-only staff to complete inspections. Using cloud-based technology the scheduler dispatches tasks to field raters each morning - this includes the relevant documentation, necessary checklists, and a field data capture tool.  This dispatch system allows staff to specialize in doing field inspections.  The field data capture tools act like a Swiss army knife - they serve as an all-in-one checklist to ensure nothing is forgotten for that specific task, record data, generate action item reports for builders, and communicate completion status and data to the office staff members. 

This practice also relies on the Ekotrope API. HERS Raters link their cloud-based field technology to Ekotrope Template Models which allow the field technology to read threshold or target values from the template that are expected to be measured or confirmed in the field. Check out our recent RESNET Conference Session where we go in-depth on cloud technology. 

Understand what type of errors your QA Style catches

There are many styles of Field QA that are approved by RESNET (RESNET is doing good work standardizing QA) and now they’ve added remote QA. We’ve observed that the best practice QA is not directly tied to the style of QA completed but instead understanding and mitigating the blindspots of each type. 

Blind Field QA -- With this style of QA, the QAD completes an independent HERS rating on a home and then compares results with the Rater’s measurements. This style of QA is considered the gold standard because it is independently duplicating and verifying the HERS Rater’s work. However, the QAD is only able to verify the Rater arrived at the correct measurements. The QAD is not able to verify the technique was correct nor provide real-time feedback and instruction.  

Ride-along QA -- This style of QA is characterized by the fact that the QAD “rides along” with the HERS Rater or RFI and observes the rater complete their work in real-time. It can be completed in-person or with a video feed. This provides the opposite benefit as Blind Field QA. The QAD can verify that the technique is correct but will likely influence a Rater’s actions by their presence. When doing this virtually, we’ve found the best practice is to record many short videos of discreet minimum-rated feature measurement tasks. 

There is a blind spot to both of these styles of QA - transcription errors.  These errors are difficult to determine their root cause and occur at two different times - recording data in the field and transcribing data into Ekotrope RATER. We are working to develop a solution and establish the best practice and new features for transcribing data into Ekotrope - contact info@ekotrope.com if you’d like to learn more.

There are many other best practices that we can highlight and just as many are likely to change as more technology is introduced to the HERS Rating Market. We anticipate technology will make best practices standard as they will be built into the tools that we all use - especially as they relate to documentation and data collection.

We hope that you find this post helpful and that you come away with some insights on how to improve your practices. As always, feel free to reach out to info@ekotrope.com if you have any questions.