Data Capture with Clavis Data Quality Steward and Microsoft

As organizations move away from paper-based data capture processes to more automated approaches Microsoft technologies including Office products, such as MS Word and Excel, Silverlight and InfoPath, are playing a central role in data collection and data quality. Because of the ease with which business users can create and edit relatively complex forms using Word and Excel, these products have become the obvious choice for establishing electronic data capture processes even in very large organizations.

Data Collection & Data Quality

Form templates for vendor or customer setup, employee expenses, purchase orders and invoices are created in Microsoft Office applications in an effort to streamline and standardize data collection processes. Getting the data into a form is just the first step in ensuring your organization has effective data collection processes, the bigger challenge is to ensure that the data captured is complete and error-free.

High quality data, delivered on time, is the primary goal of most organizations as they move from manual to electronic data capture. However, cost-effectively capturing complete, error free data from dispersed data providers remains a challenge. Limited time, limited knowledge, limited motivation and data access barriers will continue to contribute to poor outcomes, requiring manual data checking, re-keying and time-consuming “review and revert” cycles to get the data to a high enough standard.

Right First Time Data Quality

The key to achieving the full benefits of electronic data collection and capture is to remove the need for so much checking and rechecking by ensuring that data is captured “right first time”. But to consistently achieve high quality data requires providing the sort of real-time help and assistance to users as they enter data into forms and documents, which is beyond the capabilities Word and Excel. To be effective the data capture application need to be able to:

• Flag errors, inconsistencies, or missing data
• Provide guidance, hints and suggestions
• Auto-fill fields
• Dynamically provide dropdown lists
• Apply rules based on specific context
• Enable data capture personnel to ask questions and collaborate with subject matter experts