Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Set it and Forget it: The Case for Automated Reporting

During my time at Rapid Insight, I’ve found that regardless of the business, school, or non-profit we’re working with, reporting is a necessity. Anyone who has built a report knows that pulling data from an original source, cleaning it up, and transforming it into actionable information can be a clunky and time-consuming process. One of the best ways we’ve come up with to lighten the reporting load is to automate reports using Veera. Here’s our take on automated reporting, by the numbers; click on the links for full case studies:

The number of days (including interruptions!) it took Gloria Stewart, Director of Institutional Research at Schreiner University, to build an automated report.  



The number of departments within Tulsa County Juvenile Bureau that depend on reports that Shonn Harrold, Assistant Director, has automated. These reports include intake reports, detention center reports, case assignments, and referral reports. 


The number of hours that Scott Alessandro, Assoc. Director of Educational Services at MIT Sloan School of Management, saves each week by editing semi-automated ad hoc reports rather than creating new reports. 

The percentage of Excel spreadsheets that have errors, according to a 2008 study. Creating automated reports is a great way to catch spreadsheet errors as you're building a report and avoid them in the future by reducing the likelihood of human error. 

The percent improvement that Dallas Baptist University saw in terms of time spent to prepare a report by using Veera: "It took over 3.5 hours to prepare a report using our old system. It took 30 minutes in Veera."


What could you do with an extra five hours per week?

-Caitlin Garrett, Statistical Analyst at Rapid Insight

1 comment:

  1. Very interesting blog post as it relates to the article I was just reading about a recently discovered, flawed economic report by two respected Harvard Economists. The article explains how the errors ranged from weighting certain data to simple Excel errors. You can access the article here:

    http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/umass-student-exposes-serious-flaws-harvard-economists-influential-study/64357/

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