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Seeming inefficiency
Apr. 8th, 2010 08:57 pmSo, I did a small "back of the envelope" calculation about the payroll issue.
Assume a Census worker is covering cases at a rate such that they have enough stuff to merit checking it over with their Crew Leader every other day. But they have to drop off their time sheet every day. So, every other day, they're making a special trip just to drop off their time sheet - and that trip itself is billable time. Say that trip takes a half hour. In my area, that trip costs the Census Bureau $10 for the time. On average, then dropping off payroll sheets costs $5 per day.
For the 1500 folks in our local NRFU operation, that adds up to $7500 a day. Over the couple months of operations, that comes up to about $450,000 just for dropping off payroll sheets.
How much would it cost to have a decent web-developer or two put together a very simple web-app to handle this information with a basic workflow for each level up to sign off on the submissions? $100K? Let's say I'm largely over-counting useless trips, and the savings is only a quarter million dollars - that's only for the local office. Build it so each local office has a local copy, and the savings can quickly rise into the tens of millions of dollars.
I'd love to sit down with someone and ask why this wasn't done. I can think of a couple of reasons, but I'd like to explore if they're real, or imaginary reasons.
Assume a Census worker is covering cases at a rate such that they have enough stuff to merit checking it over with their Crew Leader every other day. But they have to drop off their time sheet every day. So, every other day, they're making a special trip just to drop off their time sheet - and that trip itself is billable time. Say that trip takes a half hour. In my area, that trip costs the Census Bureau $10 for the time. On average, then dropping off payroll sheets costs $5 per day.
For the 1500 folks in our local NRFU operation, that adds up to $7500 a day. Over the couple months of operations, that comes up to about $450,000 just for dropping off payroll sheets.
How much would it cost to have a decent web-developer or two put together a very simple web-app to handle this information with a basic workflow for each level up to sign off on the submissions? $100K? Let's say I'm largely over-counting useless trips, and the savings is only a quarter million dollars - that's only for the local office. Build it so each local office has a local copy, and the savings can quickly rise into the tens of millions of dollars.
I'd love to sit down with someone and ask why this wasn't done. I can think of a couple of reasons, but I'd like to explore if they're real, or imaginary reasons.
