Using our automated regulatory compliance tool, we decided to see if there was any trend of errors falling on certain days of the week. We did a data pull of the last 25 years of California water system data, and in it we found about 10 million instances of an error happening (across multiple terminal points of review).
| Day | Errors (in 1000s) | Percentage of Errors |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 849 | 10% |
| Tuesday | 1024 | 12% |
| Wednesday | 1085 | 13% |
| Thursday | 1474 | 17% |
| Friday | 1229 | 14% |
| Saturday | 1868 | 22% |
| Sunday | 1136 | 13% |
As those of you in the water regulatory industry know, essentially all water regulations follow calendar deadlines. This means the due date for samples may be by the end of a particular year, quarter, month, etc. For example, if a well is on an annual schedule, the due date will shift one day a week every year (or two days on a leap year). We were curious to see if there's a trend where deadlines on a day of a week creates higher rates of compliance errors.
What we found was Saturday had the highest incidence of compliance errors with two standard deviations above the average error rate. Interestingly Friday and Sunday deadlines, which flanks Saturday, both had fairly decent performance. One possible explanation for why Saturdays seems to be more error-prone than other days is last minute checks being done after having already worked five or more full days. If that theory is true, then that shows the importance of having rest periods following the typical five-day schedule.
We'll follow this up in about a month with a deeper analysis, to see if this theory holds up for the month of May.