Background:
Drexel University works with FIRST and FOCUS to reduce injuries in the fire service.
FIRST is a research enterprise organized to support the US Fire and Rescue Service through objective data collection and analysis. FOCUS provides fire departments with objective data to reduce injuries in the fire service.
All participating departments will receive customized reports of their safety culture scores, and where applicable, scores by individual stations within their department. As appropriate, fire departments will be able to benchmark their scores to departments in their FEMA region, and to
similar departments throughout the US.
Organizational Challenges:
Drexel University receives fire safety survey results in both paper and online formats. The survey data are then combined into an Excel file after a tedious manual data clean-up effort.
Though the Drexel University team achieved good success with their initial four dashboards, they wanted a more sophisticated distribution of survey data with the ability to print in A3 paper size dimensions.
The Challenge:
The data originated from a variety of different sources. One system housed online survey data, and the other held paper survey results. Flat files with hundreds of columns wide stored demographics by department. Manual clean-up of this data took hours and hours, and inconsistencies were prevalent. Furthermore, no automated process existed to print the PDFs for the nearly 300 departments. Drexel University certainly had a challenge ahead of itself.
The Solution:
In the first phase, the certified DataBrains team prepared the manually scrubbed data for analytics. As they joined the data in Tableau, they embarked on the mission to build a 14-page Tableau report that could be printed in A3 format.
