Snap Forum helps guru swap Scotland for Las Vegas to assist a fellow user
February 2006
John Lemon, Snap guru and Senior Computing Advisor at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland recently swapped the highlands of Scotland for the bright lights of Las Vegas to help out a fellow Snap user. His expertise lies in research data management and questionnaire design at the University but having used Snap software for eight years and being one of the first to use Snap scanning he is widely recognised as something of a specialist. The University now scans and processes on average 40-50,000 forms a year. John’s advice and expertise were called upon by Orion Performance Group to help them co-ordinate their first large-scale scanning project to ensure everything ran smoothly. John utilised his extensive knowledge to integrate a number of different software packages to meet objectives and deadlines set.
John is a regular user of the Snap Forum, which was launched last April to facilitate user communication. This online bulletin board is where you can share your experiences and seek advice from thousands of Snap users worldwide. One of our existing US users, Orion Performance Group utilised the forum to its full potential and established contact with John to ask for scanning advice. They were so impressed with his knowledge they offered to pay for him to travel to Las Vegas and oversee the whole project. John jumped at the chance of a new challenge and flew over for a week to help out. According to John, “The most exciting aspect of the project was the integration of different types of software to achieve the best possible results.”
Obstacles to overcome
The project had quite a few hurdles to overcome, one of these being the strict deadlines they had to adhere to. The objective was to process 36 different types of forms collected from a 2-½ day conference, where delegates could attend seminars to grow their business. Thousands of forms needed to be scanned, validated, processed and the data sent off within 12 hours of the end of the last seminar. Snap’s Technical Director, Dr Steve Jenkins along with John gave preliminary advice on what type of scanner would be most beneficial, as their existing model wasn’t suitable for the job. They advised that a heavy usage scanner was essential for the number of forms that needed to be processed within the short amount of time. Another challenge was that the forms were all on letter size paper not A4. John didn’t know if this would hinder the project because he had developed the forms in the UK and didn’t have any letter sized paper to test them out completely. “I couldn’t be 100% sure they would scan until the conference had started and the first forms were returned – the relief when the first batch were all detected was unbelievable”.
Success all round
After flying over to co-ordinate the whole project, it was deemed a success by all involved. A total of 3,250 forms were processed within the predetermined deadline. Each form included the delegate’s badge number to identify them and was used to generate individual reports. John set up a team of four who validated all the badge numbers and also checked the open-ended questions for discrepancies, thus ensuring accuracy of the data. Once all the forms had been scanned using Snap, John decided to use a selection of packages to convert, process, validate and analyse the data. He used Excel for data validation as the staff were familiar with that, SIR to merge the scanned data with other information and generate the file for Access while SPSS was used for statistical reporting. Snap’s integrated package enables you to analyse in as much or as little depth but if you prefer to use more than one solution you have the flexibility to export data into other applications.
Bill Schreiber of Orion Performance Group decided on Snap because of the ease of use, the ability to scan forms accurately and quickly and also the links to other software. He also comments “The Snap forum has proved a valuable resource and we are all pleased with the results that have been achieved with this international collaboration; hopefully the first of many”.
John’s final comments - “I am extremely pleased with the results of the project, with all the objectives met well within the deadline. The biggest challenge was that my body clock was still set on Scottish time, so I finally sent off the data file at 10am by my laptop clock, unfortunately for me this turned out to be 2am Las Vegas time.”