Don't mock your data entry professional

Stop right there! Before you even suggest it ... data entry is not something you can delegate or outsource to people or software not familiar with the data you collect and wish to promote.

When done right, data tells many stories. When flubbed, someone else will notice it's not up to par. Not a good look for anyone passing off information as a resource.

It's shocking to consider the number of professionals I've heard say they plan to hire someone to do data entry or worse yet, use algorithms or yikes! call centers — essentially putting an important asset into unfamiliar hands.

For Plastics News' rankings and lists, we handle about 40 details per company listed, more if you include addresses for plant locations, and 15 of which can be used for quantitative analysis. Reporting on how the industry is performing is what we do. When we say something, we have data to prove it.

Is there a correlation between resin pricing and production? There can be, but the value lies in being able to represent that relationship with real numbers to back it up, not typos or rookie mistakes.

Here is some real molding data that proves, for this company in particular, that performance isn't dependent on pricing.

Does the information even pass the common sense test? If a company has reported double the sales, then did resin pricing go up 100 percent? If not, then they probably moved more material than last year, may have installed additional machines, added workers or made an acquisition. We look for these indicators.

And now I plan to rage on about duplicates. Clean data means even more when you look at percentages. Your promotional material may say 40 percent use a product, but can we be sure you didn't count Bill and William as two, or what about "The Little Tikes Company" vs. "Little Tikes Co.?" Did that count as two, too?

The same person handling the data entry is the best person to capture and trap errors, in order to aggregate clean numbers when reporting results. This also paves the way for that same person to design the data entry procedures, automate what is repeatable and create a check and balance system to proof the work. None of these are off-the-shelf skills. Finally, as a public service announcement, I urge you to include your data entry folks in the decision making for purchasing software programs for data.

I wear many hats, however, fact checking and error trapping is the single most important thing I do. Most days you can find me hammering away at my desk keeping the Plastics News processor rankings data clean and robust. It is the key factor in my many titles, like Data Guru and Data Queen or in my favorite quote from resin reporter Frank Esposito "Hollee Keller gets results."

I am proud to be a data entry expert.