The 21st Minute

Less Labor When Analyzing Labor Data

2-Week Project Reduced to 3-Minute Task

What if you could replace two weeks of work each month with a 3-minute process that actually delivered more consistent results? Our Solutions Development team was recently approached by a client to write an IDEAScript that could perform pre-field work analysis for an audit of submitted labor charges and expenses.

The audit consisted of a series of payroll tests, including analysis of the number of hours worked for each employee, the pay scale of each employee, net value validation, and exempt vs non-exempt employees. Travel expenses and office expenses would need to be analyzed. Multiple submissions came in from different labor sites in different formats. The objective was to quantify the amount of contract labor at the various sites and detect anomalies.

The data was presented in two Excel workbooks. Between the two workbooks, IDEA was tasked with analyzing 19 tabs with as many as 10 reports to be generated for each tab.

The resulting script generated 338 result sets along with 109 Excel reports, which took an impressive 3 minutes to run. An immense time savings for the client considering their prior process took 1.5-2 weeks each month when performed manually.

More importantly, it uncovered potential abuses in the labor expense data, allowing the client to narrow their focus for future audit investigations.