Quality Signals

The Quality Signals page (Settings > Quality Signals) is where you configure how Chateau measures technician effort and decides when to flag an inspection or a technician for review. It gathers these settings into one place so an administrator can review and adjust all of them.

Everything on this page sets the thresholds and targets that drive three things:

• LSTAR, the daily schedule-adherence score for each technician.
   
• Time on Tools, the share of the payroll day a technician spends actively inspecting.
   
• The Owner's Porch audits and the Technician Scorecard, which flag inspections or technicians that fall outside the ranges you set here.

Turning an individual Owner's Porch audit on or off, and choosing who receives its email, is still done in Audit Settings — Quality Signals only sets the numbers each audit uses.

The page has five tabs. If you are setting Quality Signals up for the first time, work through them left to right: the Workday Schedule windows are referenced by several of the later settings.

Workday Schedule

This tab defines the shape of a normal working day as three time windows, drawn as a live picture that updates as you edit the times. Each window sits inside the one before it, and the tab has a section for each:

• Audit Window — Anomaly Bounds (the widest) — the outer bounds of an acceptable working day. Set "flag inspections recorded before" and "flag inspections recorded after." These two times feed the Inspections Before Hours and Inspections After Hours Owner's Porch audits, which flag any inspection recorded outside the window — usually a sign of a handheld clock problem or unusual activity.
   
• Payroll Span (inside the Audit Window) — the contracted payroll day. Set the Payroll Start and Payroll End. This span is the denominator for the Time on Tools calculation, so it should match the hours your technicians are actually paid for.
   
• LSTAR Effort Window (the tightest) — the window LSTAR uses when scoring how well a technician's day lines up with the schedule. Set the target time the first component should be monitored before, and the target time the last component should be monitored after; these are the "First Comp" and "Last Comp" standards. Turn on Retest technicians start later if your retest crews reach the field later after picking up permits — retest technicians are then scored against a later first-component target so they are not penalized for the delay.

The page states the nesting rule — the Payroll Span must not start earlier or end later than the Audit Window, and the LSTAR Effort Window must not start earlier or end later than the Payroll Span — and shows a banner under the timeline whenever the windows break it. It is a warning, not a block. Chateau still saves the values, so a database can sit in a state the banner is complaining about. Treat the banner as something to fix before you rely on the scores, not as a guard rail that has already stopped you.

Pace Targets

This tab sets, for each work type, how many inspections per day you expect (the minimum) and how many are too many (the maximum). LSTAR and the pace audit share the same work-type list, so both live in one row per type.

• Minimum (Min/Day) — the LSTAR daily target. A technician who finishes fewer than this loses the "daily component target met" portion of their LSTAR score.
   
• Maximum (Max/Day, Max/Hour, Max/Minute) — the thresholds for the Excess Inspections Owner's Porch audit. Exceeding any of them flags the technician for an unrealistically fast pace. Leave a maximum blank or set it to 0 to turn that particular cap off.

Work types are Valve + Nonconnectors, Connectors, Pumps Only, DTMs Only, and Retests Only. Retests have no maximum by default. Chateau will not let you save a row whose Min/Day is greater than its Max/Day.

Set these to the realistic range for your site and equipment. Too low a minimum makes LSTAR easy to pass and hides slow days; too tight a maximum will flag busy but legitimate technicians.

Breaks & Effort

This tab controls how LSTAR treats gaps in the day and how the LSTAR score is weighted.

Break & Lunch Limits. A "break" is any gap between two inspections that is at least the gap threshold you set here; anything shorter is counted as travel time between components.

• Break not to exceed — the maximum length allowed for the morning and the afternoon break.
• Lunch not to exceed — the maximum lunch length. LSTAR measures the actual gap from the last inspection before lunch to the first one after it.
• Gap counts as a break when ≥ — the threshold that separates a break from travel. This drives how LSTAR detects breaks, so set it to the shortest gap you would consider a real break.

LSTAR Scoring Weights. LSTAR is scored out of 100 points, and you decide how those points are split across six standards:

• First component monitored before the target time
• AM break within limit
• Lunch within its limit
• PM break within limit
• Last component monitored after the target time
• Daily component target met (the Pace Targets minimum)

The weights must add up to exactly 100. Chateau will not save the tab until they do, so if you raise one weight, lower another to keep the total at 100.

Inspection Quality

This tab sets the thresholds for the Owner's Porch inspection-quality audits. Setting a value to 0 turns that check off.

• Final Monitoring Time Less Than X Seconds — sets the threshold for the Final Monitoring Time Less Than X Seconds audit, which flags an inspection whose final reading was recorded faster than physically plausible (usually a skipped or rushed sample).
• No Monitoring Results without GPS signal — sets the threshold for the Inspections With No GPS audit, which flags monitoring results recorded without a GPS fix.

Remember that this tab only sets the numbers. Whether each audit runs, and who is emailed when it fires, is configured in Audit Settings.

A few thresholds you might expect here live on other tabs instead: before/after-hours anomalies are on Workday Schedule, excess-pace flags are on Pace Targets, and pre-calibration age is on the Calibration settings tab.

Scorecard Thresholds (Beta)

This tab configures the Technician Scorecard, which reviews inspection patterns and flags a technician for a closer look at possibly skipped or falsified inspections. The scorecard is available on every database and is currently in Beta, so it is still being refined; if you have feedback on how it flags, let LDARtools Support know.

You can turn each signal on or off and adjust how sensitive it is, and every flag on the scorecard shows the numbers behind it (the technician's value, the crew average, and how far apart they are) so you can judge each flag yourself. A Reset all to recommended button restores the suggested settings if you want to start over.

There are two kinds of signals.

Signals that compare each technician to the crew. "Normal" varies by site, so these compare a technician against your own crew rather than a fixed number. The threshold is how many standard deviations from the crew average a technician has to be before Chateau flags them: a lower number flags more technicians (more sensitive), a higher number flags only clear outliers. These signals are:

• Repetitive PPM Readings — the same handful of values instead of the natural spread you would expect
   
• Low Leak Find Rate — far fewer leaks found than the crew on similar work
   
• Fewer Leaks Than the Route Predicts — fewer leaks than the route's component mix should produce
   
• Dwell Time — routinely ending the required hold the instant the minimum is reached
   
• Readings That Just Barely Pass — an unusual share of readings just under the leak limit
   
• Trips Multiple Signals at Once — flags a technician who sets off several of the above together. This one is not measured in standard deviations: you set how many signals must trip, with Flag when a tech trips N or more signals.

Signals with a fixed limit. These do not compare to the crew; each flags a specific behavior:

• Frozen Background Reading — the same background value repeated too many times in a row
   
• Impossibly Fast Inspections — counts the technician's M21 inspections whose total monitoring time fell below the Final Monitoring Time threshold on the Inspection Quality tab, and flags the technician when that count goes above the limit you set here: Flag when the tech has more than N fast-inspection flags. Setting the Final Monitoring Time threshold to 0 turns off the tally as well as the audit, so this signal can never fire while it is 0
   
• Low Time on Tools — shown as a green / yellow / red band; you set the percentages for green and yellow, and anything below is red