Remark Customer Hall of Fame - Class of 2011

Remark Customer Hall of Fame
We want to recognize the following customers for their long-time use of the Remark products and continual feedback that has helped shape our products into what they are today. Read on to learn more about these super users and what they do with the Remark software.

• Charles Atkinson - Managing Director of QualityWorks Associates
• Pat Harold - Senior Consultant of Spectrum Business Solutions
• Shannon Tucker - Assistant Dean of Instructional Technology of University of Maryland School of Pharmacy

Charles Atkinson

• Managing Director
  QualityWorks Associates
  Customer since 1998

Charles Atkinson is the Managing Director at QualityWorks Associates, which is focused on helping organizations measure, monitor and improve their service and service development. To accomplish this goal, QualityWorks utilizes a variety of tools including surveys, interviews, mystery shoppers and field surveyors. Before QualityWorks used Remark Office OMR®, they depended upon "the good humor and energy of everyone in the office to do data entry by hand. Needless to say both the humor and energy improved when we installed Remark." QualityWorks began using Remark Office OMR in 1998.

QualityWorks’ primary use of Remark Office OMR is for conference and workshop evaluations, and for customer satisfaction surveys. A typical use is the evaluation questionnaires that QualityWorks creates and processes for The Management Roundtable, which is a knowledge and networking conference for product developers. Attendees gather at these meetings to learn about the newest approaches for developing products and services in better, faster and cheaper ways. QualityWorks’ evaluation serves two primary purposes: first to monitor the customer satisfaction of attendees and their responses to specific speakers; and second, to provide insight on issues that attendees are struggling with or are concerned about. Their questionnaires track satisfaction but also provide a number of open-ended questions that the client uses to supplement and confirm their ongoing research into development issues. Using Remark Office OMR 8, they scan the questionnaires quickly and accurately but more importantly the process, "allows us to seamlessly use voice recognition software to enter responses to open-ended questions."

One of Charles’ largest Remark projects happened almost by accident. He received a call in the afternoon from a woman who said that she had been referred to QualityWorks by one of their clients. She was trying to scan some multi-page surveys about home buying wants and was having some scanner problems and wondered if they could help her finish her project. Charles agreed to help and she overnighted a clean, unfilled survey form created on the printer that was used to print the forms. Charles told his team to expect about 400 hundred forms that needed to be processed in a hurry. By 10:00 AM the next day they had the survey and one of their staff was busy creating a template for Remark. Late in the afternoon their expected package arrived and then another larger box, and then more and more and more. They suddenly had tens of thousands of completed surveys. Charles called the client and told her that someone had mistakenly sent them every survey they had ever conducted. She replied that when she had explained that they were willing to "help" her with about 400 surveys her boss told her to send them all of the pending projects! The next day they discovered that her printer did not print the surveys but had copied them erratically and the recognition rate was very poor. Charles’ team discovered some workarounds to the poor quality that increased the recognition to about 99%. With their hard work and Remark they were able to complete all of the projects, export the data to their required format and create reports for the company. They continued to work with this client for several years but improved the printing process so that they had more control over the surveys for smooth sailing.

When asked about Charles’ favorite Remark feature, he states, "far and away the best element of Remark is the availability of live, knowledgeable support." Trailing support but still very important is, "the improvement with each new version of Remark Office OMR. The analysis capabilities are the addition that I appreciate the most." We couldn’t have made these improvements without Charles’ product input over the years and are appreciative of his tremendous loyalty.

Pat Harold

• Senior Consultant
  Spectrum Business Solutions
  Customer since 2007

Pat Harold is a Senior Consultant at Spectrum Business Solutions, which offers one of the broadest ranges of support services for Remark data collection software available today. Spectrum’s services are tailored to meet the specific needs of government and education, and include installation, form design, end-user training and systems integration. Spectrum started to offer Remark Office OMR® integrated with document scanners in 2007. Typical solutions provided by Pat’s company include student assessments, tests, student surveys and civil service exams.

Recently, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) implemented human resource shared service initiatives at the MTA’s new Business Service Center and at New York City Transit’s HR Department. As part of this effort both groups now provide pre-employment and promotion exam services for multiple agencies. The consolidated work required a more efficient process to collect data from answer forms, score exams, provide a complete statistical analysis, upload the results to the existing PeopleSoft® database and archive completed forms.

Spectrum Business Solutions responded to RFPs from both NYCT and the MTA. Spectrum was then selected by each group to implement a new approach that allowed older proprietary data collection systems to be retired and to help combine exam operations. In winning the bid, Spectrum was selected over other well-known competitors with similar solutions. The Spectrum solution incorporates the Remark Office OMR software and allows each group to offer new capabilities including custom forms, surveys, faster turnaround and more robust analytics.

The solution highlights include:

• Standard or custom exam answer forms are now designed using Microsoft Word® and laser printed on plain copy paper; as many as are needed when they are needed
• Completed forms are scanned locally with document scanners
• Immediate reports include session score and sub-scores, a complete item analysis and exam statistics
• Exam images are automatically indexed and stored electronically for easy retrieval
• Results are formatted for export to the existing database
• An open and scalable solution can be sized to meet any volume
• New data collection offerings – poll and survey forms can be scanned, tabulated and analyzed

When asked what Pat likes most about the Remark software he says, "it’s a flexible tool set that allows cost effective, easy to use and scalable solutions to be custom built to meet specific data collection needs." Here at Gravic, we have been amazed at Pat’s ability to learn Remark inside and out and find niches for the product. His continual communication with us has allowed us to better understand his markets and he has given us many ideas for practical improvements to the product… for that we are most grateful.

Shannon Tucker

• Assistant Dean of Instructional Technology
  University of Maryland School of Pharmacy
  Customer since 2007

Shannon Tucker is the Assistant Dean of Instructional Technology at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy Office of Academic Affairs. Her group is responsible for educational technology, web design and development and academic scheduling within the school. She has been working with Remark Office OMR® since 2007, when it was implemented to replace a custom card reading software written in the mid-1980s. The campus was retiring this system due to maintenance issues with the software and hardware.

Shannon’s group primarily uses Remark Office OMR for the scoring of objective multiple choice examinations on their Baltimore and Rockville campuses. They partner with their campus test scoring group and facilitate same day scoring and combined reports from the two campuses.

One of the special projects Shannon helped us with was our Blackboard® gradebook export. They have a custom written web based application written by a web developer that merges Remark generated raw scores with the Blackboard gradebook based on a student’s id number. This process was pivotal in their success migrating faculty to the Remark test scoring system, since it eased the burden of entering grades into the gradebook. Based on their Blackboard and Remark experience, they helped us test our Blackboard solution to ensure it would meet the needs of Blackboard users. Shannon says, "We think this will be a huge benefit to Remark and Blackboard users!"

One of Shannon’s favorite features is the Report Batch Wizard in Remark Quick Stats®, which she says, "makes it easy to ensure that different users receive consistent reports and cuts down on the time it takes to generate results." Shannon’s continual communication with us and willingness to test new features has helped us make better Remark products, and for that we send out a heartfelt thank you.