Forms processing system enables councils to monitor diversity
Devon County Council and Brighton & Hove Council are on track
to meet a new government requirement for diversity reporting
thanks to an AutoData forms processing system supplied by Southampton-based
Kendata Peripherals.
During the past year, councils up and down the country have
been faced with the task of collecting sometimes huge amounts
of data from their staff in order to provide information on
the percentages of ethnic minorities and disabled people employed
in local government.
At Devon County Council, the Human Resources Department recognised
that obtaining the necessary information from its workforce
of 26,000 and entering it into the computer within the time
available was a job best suited to some form of automated
data entry.
As the department’s information officer, Maggie Anderson, commented:
We needed the diversity data in electronic format so that it
could be entered into our personnel payroll system (PPS), and
although this could have been achieved manually, it would have
been a costly and time-consuming exercise.
Through links with Brighton & Hove Council, the Devon team
became aware that diversity data collection was being successfully
carried out there using an AutoData
forms processing system, so representatives from the team
travelled to Brighton to see it in operation for themselves.
At Brighton, senior consultant Tim Moore had purchased the
system initially to monitor job applicants with regard to diversity
questions and had subsequently utilised it for a complete census
of the 4500 staff directly managed by the council. Conceivably,
all this could have been done manually, he said, but it would
certainly have been resource-heavy. By investing in AutoData,
we now have a system that we can use over and over again, without
the need for key-to-disk staff.
Comprising a high-speed scanner, forms processing software,
Microsoft Word templates and special TrueType fonts, AutoData
enables customised forms to be designed in the familiar environment
of Word, which greatly reduces the learning curve for users.
The software is capable of reading data in a variety of formats,
including check-mark boxes, bar codes, printed type and hand-printed
characters.
We chose AutoData because, as far as we knew, there were no
comparable systems on the market, continued Moore. It gives
us the facility to produce our own forms without being reliant
on third-party designers, and this has enabled us to carry out
surveys quickly, accurately and cost-effectively.
After seeing the work that Brighton had undertaken, the representatives
from Devon County Council concluded that AutoData was also suitable
for their purposes, and a system was subsequently purchased
and installed in the Human Resources Department at Exeter.
Following some initial training by Kendata, the department
came up with a simple diversity questionnaire using a mixture
of check-mark boxes, bar codes and free text entry fields. These
forms were mailed out to staff together with an explanatory
letter, and after two such mailings more than 80% of the forms
had been returned.
Completed forms are scanned in, in batches, with the data being
entered directly into an Excel spreadsheet for subsequent transfer
to the PPS system. Forms are automatically displayed on the
computer screen if additional comments have been written in
free text fields or if the system’s error-checking procedures
detect an incorrectly completed form, e.g. two marks placed
in the ethnic group field or a form with no marks at all. On
one day a total of 6500 forms were entered into the system,
due in no small part to the scanner’s high rated speed of 65ppm.
The AutoData system has certainly helped us to gather the diversity
information within very tight timescales, said Maggie Anderson,
and to keep it up-to-date, we have also embarked on a programme
of diversity monitoring for the thousands of job applicants
we have each year. This required a slightly modified form design,
but with AutoData we can change it as often as necessary.
- ends -
February 2001 Ref: KE/151/A
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