M8 Systems cut your data capture costs by anything from 20 to 50 percent. Traditionally, data is captured by operators copying information from text or spreadsheet cells and pasting it, either directly into your data base input screen, or into template files which your data system can read in. This is time consuming and expensive manual work much of which can be avoided by the use of a custom built M8 data capture system.
Firstly, M8 remove the "paste" part of the operation completely. At the heart of every M8 system is a highly efficient multi-clipboard module. With an M8 system, your operators are prompted for the next field to copy and all they have to do is copy it. M8 picks up the data directly from the Windows clipboard and saves it to disk.
Secondly, the M8 system is custom designed to capture data in the order which is most efficient in operator time. Should this order differ from the field order you have planned for your data table, M8 will reshuffle the data to the order you require after capture.
Thirdly, unlike the traditional method where any derived fields have to be populated within the data base after capture, an M8 system produces complete records. Any derived fields are populated during the capture process.
Fourthly, an M8 system simplifies the checking of data after capture. At the end of capture for each record, the captured or derived data for each field can be seen by moving the mouse over the field name. In projects where data checking is a second line process, we can also provide facilities for the first line operators to output notes to the second line about any problem records.
Finally, the M8 system outputs the captured data to files which can be imported to your data table.