Business Challenge
Fairfax County has been implementing Hansen V7 for 4 years; a backlog of functions were waiting to be phased into Hansen; the County's code enforcement services needed to be bolstered through automation; a storm water asset management solution with GIS capability was in need of a requirements study prior to being automated after a 2-year delay; and a third-party mobile inspections solution was planned for upgrade at a time when the V7 database performance had degraded after Hansen cutover the last increment of users. The user departments were looking to the central Department of Information Technology (DIT) for support services to get the project moving again after its control transferred from the Department of Public Works (DPW). There were concerns at the Board of Supervisors level as another election year was approaching and the builders and homebuyers formed a vocal community in this booming East Coast County. After hiring two other firms, the County turned to AINS since it was known for quality work at Montgomery County Maryland where AINS had primed a large Hansen project. (See AINS Montgomery County Case Study). AINS was awarded a contract in October 2006 and by May 2007, AINS had successfully delivered on all these initiatives.

AINS Solutions
AINS was tasked to assist the Fairfax County Government in extending its Hansen commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software suite to support County management of commercial and residential land use activities. AINS provides support, maintenance and implementation of the Hansen application suite by applying advanced technologies to targeted offices which require techniques beyond what is offered in the out of the box COTS product. Some of the tasks assigned to AINS are described below.

Address Database Clean-up and Integration
Fairfax implemented its address repository interface by developing Oracle backend code to automate the process of cleaning-up and reconciling addresses stored in Hansen verses addresses in Fairfax's master address database. Once completed, the interface was enabled to continuously refresh the Hansen Address databases.

Duplicate Inspections Clean-up and Prevention
The County's database over time was accumulating duplicate inspections and reviews. This extra processing information is problematic in the Hansen suite. AINS was tasked to identify the processing source of these duplicates and to develop a solution to prevent them in the future. In addition, the County asked us to eliminate the duplicate inspections that existed in the production database. In support of this task, AINS cleaned-up the duplicate inspections in the production database, identified the source(s) for the duplicate inspections and reviews, and implemented a backend Oracle-based solution to eliminate the duplicate inspections from ever being created.

Eliminate Delays in Advancing Applications to Their Final Processing Steps
AINS designed and implemented a backend, Oracle-based solution to automatically progress the applications in Hansen to their Final Stages, but only when the final inspection is approved. This avoids delays in processing due to the need for staff to detect and manually progress applications ready to move through their final processing steps. The implemented solution also prevents the Final Stage advancement until re-schedules are complete as well.
Configure and Rollout Home Occupation Permits
AINS added support for Home Occupation Permit business process in the Department of Public Works (DPW) using the Hansen suite's native capabilities, Oracle database triggers and stored procedures, and Crystal reports. Our solution required the full project lifecycle to define the required process, configure the tools, and develop advanced approaches using Oracle coding to work around some of the native Hansen limitations.

Configure and Rollout Code Enforcement
AINS installed and configured the Hansen Complaints Module to support the approximately 10 different types of Code Enforcement business processes at DPW upon completion of business process analysis. The activity involved interaction and integration across other agencies also using the complaints module. This project addressed many different sub-processes that occur when the complaint is received centrally, but as it is addressed, its processing varies based on the difference in statutory or policy considerations. As a result, AINS performed a business process analysis, configured the Hansen Code Enforcement and Service Request Module to support the required process, and then implemented a host of database level triggers to enforce the varying process-dependent business rules. For example, in some cases each Service Request automatically opens an associated Case by the same number. This was implemented wholly via backend coding as it is not supported in the native Hansen suite.