Introduction
The client is an organization dedicated to helping businesses, governments and communities achieve food security in central Africa. The company also helps NGOs do feasibility studies for small to large-scale agricultural development projects by gathering data directly from the communities concerned.
The client had requested to digitalize their data-gathering operations to reduce data inaccuracies and speed up data processing to compile detailed and accurate reports.
The challenge
- The client turnaround time for compiling reports is long due to manual processes.
- The team would print forms to take on-site for surveys and sometimes lose the data.
- Numerous human errors during the input of the data collected into spreadsheets.
- Difficulty measuring field agents’ performance.
- Longer turnaround for the overall data collection process.
The solution
We recommended building a simple custom solution to simplify their processes. The system would allow administrators to create dynamic forms using an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
The system would also identify the field agents using their cellphone numbers via an OTP to measure performance and allow the capture of field data using a mobile or tablet first web interface.
Most importantly, the data collected on-site using the dynamic forms would be stored in a database in the cloud to allow a live inspection of the submitted data. The data is also exportable in Excel for custom reporting.
The process
It took 3 months to build the system, integrate the third-party SMS service, and auto-generate the reports per project.
Once the solution was in place, we onboarded all the internal stakeholders and immediately tested on a field survey to measure turnaround time improvements.
The outcome
The client had significantly decreased the turnaround time in providing final reports. There is less human error and the data collection process is faster and more engaging.
