Case Studies

Problem: A business uses Excel to schedule employee meetings with clients. Employees want to fill out the schedule from their perspective, but managers want to view the final schedule from the perspective of clients.

This scheduling process is completed once a week for hundreds of employees and clients. There were no simple solutions using only Excel. Manually processing the schedule took several hours each week and was prone to errors.

Solution: Data Dot Plus developed a simple web application (LINK) to upload, invert, and download the schedule. Employees and managers are both able to work with the schedule in their preferred format.

The web app was developed with no up-front cost and is available for a low monthly fee of $10 / month.

Learn more: LINK

Problem: A school tracks class enrollment in a database and receives a spreadsheet every day with a snapshot of the data. They want to produce a table of the daily changes to the database to determine when classes were added, removed, or changed.

The daily spreadsheet has about 4,000 rows and 46 columns, and there are at least 150 files to compare every year. There were no simple solutions using only Excel. Manually processing the spreadsheets would have taken hundreds of hours and would be prone to errors.

Solution: Data Dot Plus developed a simple web application (LINK) to upload multiple daily spreadsheets, compare changes, and download a table of daily changes. The school is able to easily track changes to their database.

The web app was developed with no up-front cost and is available for a low annual fee of $200 / year.

Learn more: LINK

Problem: A professor wanted to standardize student lab reports to better study learning outcomes. 

Solution: Data Dot Plus developed a web application to automate and standardize lab report development and submission. 

Check out the web application here: SAWHET (STEM Automated Writing Help Tool).

Problem: An energy company wanted to migrate their data from a spreadsheet to a relational database with a more comprehensive and standardized structure. 

Solution: Data Dot Plus developed a custom data pipeline to transform, standardize, and disaggregate the data into the database format. I developed data quality checks for compliance with the business rules of the database and collaborated with subject matter experts to resolve any issues. 

The client recognized cost-savings compared to manual processing in spreadsheets and had increased confidence in data quality.

Problem: A consulting company wanted to delegate responsibility for software management from the Information Technology (IT) department to separate business units with various, sometimes overlapping, technical capabilities and software needs.

Solution: Data Dot Plus developed a custom data pipeline to associate business units and software by identifying clusters of software that were often used together and calculating the percent of each cluster in each business unit.

This analysis enabled the company to appropriately delineate between common and unique software needs. The IT department was able to retain responsibility for common software and each business unit was able to take responsibility for the software unique to their needs.