Case: PwC

Manual cleaning and structuring of data from customers’ financial systems is a big recurring task in for the revision company PwC. It is a time consuming and very repetitive task, that is usually done by student helpers. Even though data extracts from financial systems arrive unstructured, they do follow a certain logic – a pattern. In light of autistic people’s documented talent for pattern recognition, PwC entered into a collaboration with Specialisterne; a pilot project to see if a consultant from Specialisterne could do the standard task of manually cleaning and structuring customer data faster and with fewer mistakes than usual.

PwC had prepared different workstations, depending on how much calm the consultant form Specialisterne wanted around them; but it quickly turned out that the consultant worked best with other people around them, and ended up working in the big room office with the rest of their team members.

Here the consultant was cleaning and structuring data from PwC customers’ financial systems in Excel spreadsheets that went up to a million lines, and afterwards other PwC employees would take over the job with the now structured financial data.

The consultant’s specific work assignments were, among others:

• Cleaning and structuring of data from financial systems exported in Excel spreadsheets.
• Validation and testing of new, structured Excel spreadsheets to find mistakes and shortcomings.
• Attunement of financial data.
• Clarification of attunement differentials in financial data.
• Written and verbal communication with internal “customers” about differentials and shortcomings in the forwarded material.

”Our expectation that an autistic consultant, with their ability to recognize patterns, would do the job with cleaning and structuring data faster and with fewer mistakes has been met. The consultant was fast, and there were an unusually small number of mistakes in the work that the consultant did.”

“But we also learned that the length of the task is important for the time related profit. The longer the single tasks took, the bigger the positive effect got from using a consultant from Specialisterne.”

“The pilot project has shown us that there is a great potential in using autistic consultants for this type of task, and we are absolutely certain that we can get Specialisterne and our business to work together.”

Christian Alexander, Manager, Assurance, Services, Methods, & Tools, PwC.