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Standard Code has established itself as an expert in helping large organizations transition from locally held databases (think Access and Excel) to cloud based databases, using excel and access to collect and analyze data.
Real World Scenario
Standard Code was commissioned by a major global health initiative to help bring their process of collecting data for eliminating a debilitating disease from humanity. The process for applying to this program went something like this:
- A program associate would generate an application for a given country using MS Excel. Since the application can contain as many as a few hundred rows (districts) across a few dozen columns (indicators), spanning as many as 8 different tabs, this process was tedious and prone to error.
- The application was sent off to the country's ministry of health to gather their input.
- After a few weeks / month, the application was sent back and the program associate would reconcile the changes made by the MoH. Often times this meant multiple versions of the application would be created, exchanged w/ the MoH, and swapped back and forth. This process could take a month to finish.
- After all the data was gathered, the applications would be compiled into a single large report that could be used during their bi-annual meeting where applications were approved or rejected.
- Data was stored in dozens of spreadsheets and consolidated into an Access database.
- This made the data next to impossible to report on. And even more difficult to share and collaborate.
- Excel spreadsheets changing format (adding columns, adding districts, etc) made for data consistency issues.
When you look at this process, you can see how much manual labor is involved. But more importantly, you see how likely it is that an error can occur. Studies show that 94% of all excel spreadsheets have an error of some kind with 5.2% of cells having bad data. (note)
How we improve this process
We started by moving as much of the process to the cloud as we possibly could. By moving the data to the cloud, we solved more than a few problems:
- Reporting: this is by far the greatest benefit
- Access: you can now access the data from anywhere, anytime
- Security: a big misconception about the cloud is data security. We secure our data with 2048 bit encryption, firewalls, complex passwords, and even offer the ability to utilize Amazon's Government Cloud infrastructure for added security
- Portability: all data from the website can easily be exported to an excel spreadsheet and re-uploaded.
We built a platform to leverage the cloud to expedite and automate all of the processes that caused the old solution to take so much time and be error prone. Now our platform:
- Generates the application: no more manual intervention. What used to take hours and hours can be done in just a few minutes freeing up program associates to do what they do best.
- Reconciling applications: we no longer rely on the program associates to look for differences in applications. The platform now does that for them and reports back on changes made by the MoH.
- Reporting: by centralizing the data we can now easily report and do trend analysis across multiple years, countries, and districts.
The end results is a system that saves time and money, allowing for the eradication of the disease as quickly as possible.
