Submission of company data to survey vendors is a necessary evil. A Company’s access to high quality market data is dependent both on annual participation and on comprehensive submission of data from a variety of company sources. There are two cost components to acquiring vendor market data, the direct out-of-pocket cost to purchase the market results and the indirect costs of dedicating resources to respond to vendor requests for data. There is a substantial resource commitment to submit company data to surveys a fact that most survey vendors do not appreciate. From their perspective, the submission process is one-directional…you provide data in a way that makes it easy for us to process. There is little attention paid to the requirements or to the impact of the submission process on companies because most survey analysts have never prepared a survey submission.

To efficiently manage survey submissions, LS&A has developed specialize work processes and analytical tools. Our processes include critical quality assurance checks to improve data quality and minimize required vendor follow-up. Examples include the following:

• Job Matches: we’ve developed an analysis tool to screen all incumbent matches to a selected survey and display employee and survey records where pay is outside user-specified boundaries. This tool helps us identify potential bad matches and incumbent records that should be excluded (e.g. red circled employees)
• Quality Assurance – incumbent records: we have developed data management tools that help us quickly identify incumbent records that should be excluded from the submission including:
  • Part-time employees
  • Employee locations outside the survey market area
  • Incorrect pay data
• Quality Assurance – submission summary: we mimic the Q/A process used by survey vendors to compare the change in the number of incumbents and average pay for each job Vs the prior year submission. This Q/A step enables LS&A to identify and ANTICIPATE changes that would likely trigger a set of vendor follow-up questions that must be researched.

LS&A’s job is to provide high quality data submissions for our clients while employing best practice processes that limit the impact of the many submission bottlenecks that increase the indirect costs of survey submissions to our clients.