21st Century Updates Historic Estates
Business
The company that
manages land, property and business assets for the Duke
of Northumberland has taken a massive leap into the 21st
century with a new state of the art computer system.
Northumberland Estates, which is based at Alnwick
Castle, has traditionally relied on paper records
including maps some of which are over 100 years old
to undertake the management of the Duke’s estate,
which extends to 180 farms including over 5000 leases
and tenancies and other interests, spanning commercial,
agricultural and residential property.
The maps, containing details of farms, fields,
forests, residential property and office and industrial
developments throughout the North East, have been
altered many times over the past century, and relate to
many thousands of estate records including title
documents, transfers, leases, wayleaves, development
agreements and so on.
Visionary look to the future
The conversion of this priceless, historic
information into readily accessible computerised data
has been a key feature of the modernisation of the
business systems at Northumberland Estates.
Graham Caygill, Project Manager at Northumberland
Estates, explained: "In terms of IT, we were
probably as advanced as most rurally-based businesses
with a small network of ten PCs. But we realised that
the system could clearly be much better.",
Graham and the Duke’s land agent Rory Wilson
together formed a vision of how a new system would work
and set about finding a suitably qualified company to
‘partner’ them through the process to implement a
core system which would provide long term, sustainable,
strategic advantage to the business.
After evaluation Northumberland Estates selected
Imass, a company based in Gosforth, Newcastle, which
specialises in providing turnkey IT solutions for the
property sector and for a wide range of industrial and
commercial organisations. Imass’ Chartis system for
property management ideally fitted the bill.
The key strength of Imass for Northumberland Estates
was its ability within the field of Geographical
Information Systems (GIS) and experience in dealing with
the biggest utility companies.
Graham said: "Our business is quite specialised
and has particular requirements because it is land
based. Because of their experience with the utilities,
Imass already had a great deal of know-how that allowed
them to hit the ground running, and the capability to
deliver a strategic GIS based property management system
which would provide great business benefits for
us."
Integrating functionality to improve business
benefits
At its heart Imass Chartis provides a set of digital
Ordnance Survey maps onto which information can be
placed as different layers. It is therefore very easy to
see and understand any land-based information from which
areas may need to be calculated, boundary lines
identified, buildings to be measured and water, gas or
electricity pipes and installations to be detected.
Additionally, the real power of the system is the
fully integrated property management functionality which
can be easily extended into other operational
applications to improve business benefits all round.
The project started two years ago with the
installation of the new computer network and has
progressed with the installation of key software for
mapping and office and management use, staff training
and a pilot project that was completed successfully.
At the same time, the massive task of transferring
information from paper to digital maps has been going on
and is expected to, when finished mid way August 2000,
have taken between five and six years in man hours.
Frank Brown, Account Manager at Imass, said:
"The GIS is the ideal front end management tool
that gives Northumberland Estates the ability to make
more use of its computerised information in an
interactive way with property management functionality
and, ultimately, integrated works management, accounts
and other such applications."
The original IT
set up has been completely replaced with a more modern
and robust system. Over 30 PCs now run on a re-cabled
network under the Windows NT operating system and Oracle
database.
This formed the platform for the implementation of
Imass Chartis, which includes a tailored mix of ‘off-the-shelf’
and bespoke software packages to suit the client all
provided by Imass who will fully support and maintain
the system, which goes live in July 2000.
The IT company works very closely with International
software company Bentley Systems, providers of the core
GIS products on which Imass build their applications.
Its own products have been developed over a number of
years to compliment the GIS and can be adapted to the
exact needs of any client.
Northumberland Estates has also taken advantage of
Imass’ extensive training capabilities, including
three dedicated training suites. All of the staff have
been trained in the use of new Windows-based packages
while specialist managers are learning to deal with the
full data management and running of network.
Making management become easier and more efficient
The power of the new computer system comes from its
ability to hold and share massive amounts of
information. The data can be viewed by any number of
users at the same time as a mixture of graphics and text
windows that makes it much easier to digest.
Graham added: "We need access to all sorts of
information on a daily basis, for instance the details
of service pipes and cabling for builders or to confirm
ownership and rights to particular areas of land.
"To hold all this by conventional means requires
mountains of paper and generally leads to time lost
searching for the particular information you need.
"By holding such records as computerised data
which is accessible via map-based GIS linked to easily
updated databases, then the job of management becomes
easier and much more efficient."
A key feature of Imass’ service has been ‘data
capture’ which is the conversion of paper-based
information to data that can be used on a computer. As
this involves the A2-size 100 year old maps that have
been altered many times over the years the work has been
time-consuming and brings into play Imass’ specialist
expertise and resource into this area.
The task is also complex because of the need to avoid
duplication and the final aim to have a seamless
database covering all aspects of Northumberland Estates’
work.
Trevor Robertson, Imass Senior Executive for the
Property Sector, believes that the task was only made
possible through teamwork, good planning and attention
to detail.
"Northumberland Estates and its staff are making
quite a leap into new technology and it is important
that we take them with us," he said. "Through
prototyping and authentication we have been able to
involve everyone to a greater degree in the process and
allow them to drive the pace and complexity of
change."
Imass Chartis has formed a core data holding register
for Northumberland Estates. Looking to the future, the
next step is to develop and extend the system to further
reduce data duplication, further improve service
performance and generate greater efficiencies, such as
the works management system.
Northumberland Estates have been visionary in
converting their old, decaying paper maps and property
records with an electronic system. To merely replace the
old paper systems with new ones would have meant
substantial investment and a data capture exercise would
still be needed. All of the old paper based systems have
been stored away in an archive for reference in the
future.
By moving to Imass Chartis their investment is much
more cost effective, will have a much longer lifespan,
and crucially will be kept up to date with new release
and updates being placed on the system at regular
intervals. Northumberland Estates and Imass can be
justifiably proud of their achievements in this project.
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