Corporate research team at Unilever is enjoying a significant reduction in the time taken to enter data from the many questionnaires completed by participants in its studies
Thanks to an AutoData forms processing system from Kendata Peripherals, the corporate research team at Unilever's biosciences division near Bedford is enjoying a significant reduction in the time taken to enter data from the many questionnaires completed by participants in its studies.
The team regularly produces booklets of questionnaires for use in research into diseases like diabetes and in clinical trials of various food and beverage products.
Designed to assess factors such as mood, general health state, and intake of refreshments, the questionnaires generate huge amounts of data, all of which has to be entered into a PC for analysis.
Unilever's Jacqui Coverly takes up the story: "This data entry work used to be done by hand - we would sit there with a booklet of results and literally just punch numbers in.
"Then it would all have to be done a second time by a different person, and any discrepancies resolved".
Using this double-entry technique meant that the corporate research team could be confident about the accuracy of the data, but the process was inevitably laborious and time consuming.
Eventually the team found that it was simply too busy to be able to continue with this approach, and so it began looking at alternative methods of data entry.
"There are companies out there that will do the work for you," Coverly continued, "but even researchers have to keep to a budget, and contracting out is not always an affordable option".
It was then decided that some form of automated data-entry technology would be adopted, and, after having evaluated three scanner-based systems, Unilever settled on AutoData Scannable Office from Kendata Peripherals.
Jacqui Coverly again: "Although we looked at two other systems, we chose AutoData because the software was very user-friendly, the whole package was competitively priced, and Kendata offered comprehensive after-sales support".
Consisting of a high-speed scanner, forms processing software, Microsoft Word templates and special TrueType fonts, AutoData Scannable Office enables data to be scanned from paper forms directly into an Excel spreadsheet or Access database without the need for cumbersome data exporting procedures.
Since customised forms are designed in the familiar environment of Word, this greatly reduces the learning curve for users.
Form designs can include fields for check-mark boxes, bar codes, printed type and hand-printed characters.
"With AutoData, we could take the questionnaires that we had developed in Word over the years and just adapt them into a scannable format," commented Coverly.
The research team typically uses a combination of check-mark boxes, hand-print recognition fields, and bar codes in its form designs.
Completed forms are batched up and scanned, then after having been processed and verified by the AutoData software, the data is transferred directly into Excel or Access, depending on the requirements of the application. "The key benefit of the AutoData system," said Coverly, "has been the enormous amount of staff time it has saved - not least because it has eliminated the need to enter everything twice, as we used to have to do with manual data entry."
