Actions Taken

Initial steps focused on reviewing the current data acquisition process, which, while not optimal, was continuing to be used as the production system for data transcription. The costs associated with both retooling the data acquisition process and in retraining staff were negative incentives as was any interruption to the ambitious production quotas that were currently being met. These negative incentives precluded a re-design to a more appropriate front-end process. Consequently, an alternative strategy was elected to maintain the currency of data in the resulting database. This strategy involved the development of programs to read several versions of the Excel workbooks on an ongoing basis, to evaluate data for accuracy, and to store quality-checked data in an SQL Server database.