The administration
building at particular university houses the Office of Compliance. Each year,
the university’s Compliance Officer provides a report of on-campus and
off-campus crime statistics for the University along with other universities to
show comparison. The reports are simple and quick to create, and they vary from
year to year depending on which schools are requested to be included in the
comparison. Preparing the data, however, is a much more laborious process
assigned to a student employee. As many university departments experience, the “student
employee” is different every year due to high turnover. So each year a new
student must be trained by the compliance officer to clean and prepare the data.
Additionally, most student employees lack experience with spreadsheets, so they
use manual techniques to cut and paste data. It is not uncommon for rows and
columns of data to get mismatched, or for a random university to mistakenly be
deleted altogether. This adds hours of work for the compliance officer who must
review the data and check for errors. The Excel program created to address this
problem uses VBA code to get rid of unwanted data entries and combine multiple
excel files (provided online by the US DOE) into one workbook from which
reports can then be created. The automated process is complete in just minutes
and significantly reduces the potential for errors. Additionally, the workbook
includes instructions to complete the process, which reduces the time required
to train. The expected reduction in labor costs is hundreds of dollars, and the
busy Office of Compliance will be able to allocate labor to other priorities.
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