I have a MSC that has a grocery store audit that is really simple to do once you read the 32 page book the first time and know what they are looking for. They also have an audit form for this shop that is 20 pages long and are repeating exactly the same questions for each of the seperate areas of the store in the most long and drawn out way possible.
I live less than 3-4 miles from three of the store locations and checked the box in the survey that triggers auto re-assignment with this MSC. This is also a survey that is done twice a month. I will check each new shop to make 100% certain they have not modified the survey, but I spent about 15 minutes creating a one page spreadsheet that has every single question on there with a box for the answer. This will save me ink and paper and also make it faster for me to do the shop and get the data entry done when back home. Is anyone else making up their own survey "cheat sheet" for a shop that don't appear to be changing and is an ongoing shop?
As far as printing costs, I have an old Brother black and white laser printer with a built in duplexer. (Duplexer flips the sheet of paper and feeds it back into the printer to print on both sides automatically)
The toner cartridge on this thing lasts for three reams of paper if printing text. The printer driver allows me to put two pages on each page (and even four, if my eyesight was that good) and still read it fine, so I get 4 pages printed to each sheet of paper for shops that I will need to print the full form out. This MSC seems to really be determined for you to print the form, as they have a shopping number that will only show up when you print the form that must be entered before you can start the survey.
This is not a very difficult thing to bypass. I attacked it with the view source code of webpage, being the geek that I am and got the number that way. Then, when I decided to make my one page spreadsheet, I cut and pasted the whole webpage from the browser into notepad to get raw plain text to paste into the header boxes of the spreadsheet. This resulted in revealing the number and was as low tech as humanly possible. Sometimes, I just try too hard to do things the tech way. I was almost disappointed the number was that easy to get. There is no way to stop someone from using a printer driver to print to .pdf or .jpg. This will always work, even if they did obsfucate the number better in the webpage code, if they decided to try making it harder to get without printing the form out.
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2014 08:09PM by scanman1.