Data preparation
Scope condensing
A major Australian rail operator, resurfacing operations
The situation
Before a scope could be written, the underlying data had to be condensed: hundreds of repetitive, adjacent entries collapsed into the consolidated ranges a scope is actually expressed in. It was done by hand. It took a long time, it was tedious enough that it was easy to lose concentration, and two people doing the same job would not necessarily produce the same output.
What we built
An auto-condenser that performs the consolidation deterministically. Raw data in, condensed scope data out, with the same rules applied every time regardless of who runs it.
The result
The task stopped being a task. Beyond the time returned, the output is now consistent, which matters more than it sounds: a scope built on consistent data can be compared against last month’s, and against another region’s.