Midland Heart standardises on Cadcorp GIS for housing management

Oct. 22, 2012 - PRLog -- With nearly 32,000 homes, Midland Heart is the largest provider operating in 54 local authorities across the Midlands, with a stock portfolio that includes nearly 22,000 general needs properties; over 2,000 shared ownership homes and a significant care and support provision of nearly 6,500 units.

“Housing associations continually have to balance the need to generate social as well as financial returns”, noted James Jervis of Midland Heart. “Geographic information systems technology helps us deliver against both sets of obligations.  Although we have been using GIS effectively for a number of years, its use was limited to a few specialist staff at Midland Heart who had desktop GIS software.  We recognised that if we were to allow all staff to visualise key internal and external datasets geographically, we needed to deploy a web-based application.”

Midland Heart invited a number of GIS software suppliers to propose an Intranet web mapping solution and following an extensive evaluation selected Cadcorp technology to provide not only the web mapping application, but also replace their existing desktop GIS. The new combined system will now manage the location of properties, Land Registry title polygons, and land use data, against background data sets which will include OS OpenData™ and OS MasterMap®.

“We had two requirements that weren’t open for discussion” continued James Jervis. “The first was that the web mapping application should be easy for staff to use. The second was that it should be convenient to administer without the need for external involvement.  Cadcorp Web Map Layers met both of these requirements. We didn’t set out to standardise on one GIS technology. We were equally open to proposals for web mapping applications which would co-exist with our current desktop GIS. We found that Cadcorp SIS technology would allow us to coexist in the short term, before eventually migrating to a standardised infrastructure.”

Mike O’Neil, CEO of Cadcorp said: “Geographic information is central to the work of housing associations. It is encouraging to see Midland Heart unlocking the value of that information by making it available to as many staff as possible. “

For more information about Cadcorp visit www.cadcorp.com

For more information about Midland Heart visit www.midlandheart.org.uk


CONTACT

Cadcorp
Richard Spooner
Marketing Manager
+44 1438 747996
richard.spooner@cadcorp.com

ABOUT CADCORP

Cadcorp is a British software development company focused on geographic information system (GIS) and web mapping software. We offer a complete suite of products - the Cadcorp Spatial Information System ® (Cadcorp SIS®) - addressing all phases of spatial information management.  Cadcorp SIS is available worldwide through a network of Cadcorp partners and through a direct sales team in the UK and Ireland.