We are happy to share that we have just come back from Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, where we successfully deployed a new version of our all-in-one tablet-based survey, data analysis and reporting tool. The project was carried out to collect the information needed for a socio-economic impact study for the road administration.
These surveys are vital in establishing the long-term effects of a road project, and have a long history of being carried out manually: creating survey documents, printing and carrying hundreds of copies, marking them by hand in the field, and spending many weeks digitising the input before any analysis can start. We believe this approach is vastly inefficient, which is why we invested in our own system for the whole pipeline:
- A survey is created, or an existing survey is modified
- A team of researchers armed with tablets is dispatched to the field
- The tablets are used to collect the data
- All the collected data syncs seamlessly and automatically with the server
- The server crunches the data and updates the report whenever new data arrives
- The team back at the office follows the changes live and asks clarifying questions if necessary
- As soon as the last submission takes place, the full report exists
This cuts weeks of busy work handling paper, making corrections (the system rejects incorrectly entered data, so there is no need for manual checks), data entry and chasing human errors. The automated analysis also lets us dig into apparent issues on the spot, which simply was not possible before.
We are proud of these results and happy to make the system available to anybody who needs it.
