Ticket Flow
Fetching
The tickets are sent from the One Call center, utility company, or screening company to an email box set up for the feed on the locating company's mail server. TicketRx is configured to access these email boxes and collect the tickets sent. This procedure is called Fetching. The email receiver settings are configured in the Admin/Receivers screen.
Parsing
Once tickets have been fetched, they are briefly stored in the feed's 'in-directory'. The tickets are stored here until they are parsed. When a ticket is parsed, all important information is read off of the ticket and entered into the TicketRx database along with storing an actual image of the ticket. The following list contains information that can be parsed from tickets depending upon the feed's parser configuration:
- Call Date
- Caller Email Address
- Caller Fax Number
- Caller Name
- Caller Phone Number
- City
- County
- Description
- Excavator
- Excavator Address
- Excavator City
- Feed
- Lead Time
- Legal Due Date
- Map Location
- Meet Code
- Meet Date
- State
- Street Direction
- Street Name
- Street Number
- Subdivision
- Ticket Number
- Ticket Type
- Transmission Number
- Type of Work
- Work Date
- Work Done For
Applying Due Dates / Reading Locates
After the ticket information is parsed from the ticket, a due date is assigned to the ticket based on the due rules configured for the feed. Due rules are configured in the Due Rule tab on the Admin/Feeds screen. Next, the locates are read off of the ticket. Locates will only be added for terms that are configured for the feed.
Auto-Closing
Auto-close rules are applied to any locates that meet the configured rules. Auto-close rules are used to automatically close locates based on the following criteria:
- Term
- Feed
- Excavator
- Work Done For
Screening Tickets
If a screening bucket is configured for the utility, the tickets for the utility will be routed to the assigned screener's bucket. More information about the Screening feature can be found here.
Routing
Once the auto-close rules have been applied, the locates are routed to a user using the City-County-State and Custom routing rules.
Combining Tickets
If multiple copies of the same ticket are received, they will be automatically combined and only shown as one ticket within TicketRx. For example, if a copy of the ticket is received from the One Call center, and another copy is received from the screening company, these tickets will be combined in TicketRx. This helps to avoid confusion and prevents locators from accidentally going to the same work site multiple times. Tickets will not be combined if the original ticket is already closed when the additional copies of the ticket are received. More information about the Ticket Combining feature can be found here.
Downloading / Working Tickets
After the ticket has been parsed, locates have been added, and the auto-close and routing rule have been applied, the ticket will be added to the assigned locator's list of tickets during his next sync. After the ticket is received, the locates can be statused. Once all locates have been statused, the ticket will be closed. More information about working tickets can be found here.
Responding
If response codes are configured for the status codes for the feed and the feed is configured to queue responses, after each locate is statused, a response will be added to the response queue. Then, when the responder is run, the responses will be transmitted to the address set up to receive the responses for the feed.
Queued responses older than 15 days will be removed from the response queue. This increases the effectiveness of the responder monitoring, because the results are not cluttered with old responses that are no longer useful. If responses older than this are ever needed to be sent, they can be recreated and sent on an as-needed basis.
Notifying Excavators
If the Notify Excavators field is checked on the Admin/Feeds screen, notifications will be sent to the excavators. The notifications will be sent to the fax number parsed from the ticket. If there is no fax number available on the ticket, a notification will not be sent to the excavator. More information about excavator notification faxes can be found here.
Billing
Each locate change is called an "activity". An "activity" is a billable item, and all activities are collected and billed nightly using user defined billing rates and custom billing rules. The Billing Extract report provides an extract of the billing data. For customers with larger amount of billing data, this report is provided manually on a regular basis.