September 17, 2009 -- The UK’s Blaby District Council has selected software from GGP Systems to provide real time, corporate wide access to essential planning information. Using a specially developed synchronisation tool which enables the joining up of back office databases with front office services such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and Council websites, records held within the Leicestershire Council’s planning system are automatically linked to their Geographical Information System (GIS). This allows users across the organisation to search, view and access both current and historical planning information from the desktop.

Blaby Council holds textural planning information in a series of UNI-form modules from IDOX Group, while all spatial data, such as Ordnance Survey Mapping and the Council’s National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG), is held in GGP GIS. The GGP Synchroniser tool will be used to link the frontline spatial data with both current and historic planning information including Planning Applications, Tree Preservation Orders, Enforcement Cases and Listed Building data.

It is hoped that by integrating the two systems staff across the organisation will have improved access to essential planning histories with improved search functionality and a single access point via the GIS. The use of the GGP Synchroniser tool will also reduce the need for duplication of information, reducing the administrative burden of data entry and maximising data quality.

“As our spatial data is viewed corporately it made sense to leave it in a system and a format that was easily accessible to all departments. We considered alternative methods of linking the two systems but this would have resulted in duplicate data, which would have ultimately caused problems with data integrity, currency and accuracy,” commented Jo Hickling, Planning Systems Officer at Blaby District Council.

Part of a suite of GGP Synchroniser tools, the live synchronisation software is a server-side application designed to automatically reflect changes made to data in back office databases to replicated fields within corresponding layers in GGP GIS or GGP’s web solution eGGP. GGP Synchroniser can be used to join up databases holding planning, highways, housing, environmental health or any other council data as it supports many OLE DB compliant databases including Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, MySQL and FoxPro.

“Once we have completed proof of concept with this initial deployment of GGP Synchroniser we hope to roll out the system to departments across the organisation to link other essential back office systems and data in the same way,” concluded Hickling.

Contact: Prim Maxwell at GGP tel. +44 (0)20 8686 9887, e-mail: Email Contact, www.ggpsystems.co.uk