Survey platforms that play nicely with JMP

Question

Do any of you know of a survey platform that sends output as a .JMP data table directly? I found one (aytm) that does, but I'm wondering if there are others.

My reason for asking: I have a customer that works in the consumer marketing industry, and is getting more and more demand for receiving the data in JMP format (yay!), but the customer has to translate the data, often from an SPSS or CSV file. This translation takes extra time and effort, and is hard to automate, since every survey/data set is different. So, they are willing to adopt other platforms if it means saving time when the customer is expecting data in JMP format.

briancorcoran · Answer

SPSS Import is still available on both Mac and Windows versions of JMP through File Open (and JLS).  If the .sav file is created by a Third Party app and not SPSS, the results can be spotty. I recently came across a Python module that imports SPSS (pyreadstat) and was curious how it would do.  I was able to write a data connector to use this module and for simple files it did pretty well.  For large files, it could not read Multiple Response columns and returned missing values, which to me was a deal-killer.  It was also pretty slow and could not handle Asian character sets.

Our SPSS import relies on some very complex code that was created by a former SAS employee, so it does represent a maintenance risk going forward, which is why I was looking at alternatives.

Brian

Bill_Worley · Answer

@Jed_Campbell,

While I was still at P&G, they were vigorously trying to find a way to convert SPSS files into JMP data tables directly.  JMP put a lot of time and effort into making this happen and the results were good at the time.  I don't know if those options still exist, but you could check with Brian Corcoran and team to see.  Also, around the same time, P&G demanded that all of the big survey companies provide their survey data in JMP to avoid the need for direct importation of SPSS files.  There was a lot of resistance, and I don't have the particulars of where things stand today.

P&G has since pushed to use JMP throughout their Consumer Market Knowledge group which runs all of their surveys.  I am only guessing this would mean they are getting JMP data tables directly from the survey companies.  Pete Hersh may have more details.

Hope this helps.

Bill

Jed_Campbell · Answer

As a follow up to this question, I was only able to find one company (aytm) that exports directly into a .jmp data table. However, it seems like nearly all the platforms allow for REST API usage, so I'll recommend that as a solution to the customer.