GGP Helps East Ayrshire Deliver a Digital Future

12 August 2008, 9:10am

A specially developed address management solution from GGP Systems is helping the delivery of 21st Century Government in East Ayrshire. The NGz Gazetteer Management System is designed to manage the Council’s Corporate Address Gazetteer, providing advanced data maintenance tools, integrating with essential front office services and back office systems and linking the local property database to the National Hub contributing to the Definitive National Address (DNA) Scotland programme.

With the Council’s headquarters located in Kilmarnock, an award winning town centre in the south west of Scotland, East Ayrshire Council is one of 32 Scottish Councils to develop local Corporate Address Gazetteers (CAG) to a common standard and specification. Originally created by combining data from Council Tax records, Non Domestic Rates and Ordnance Survey ADDRESS-POINT East Ayrshire’s CAG was cleaned and produced to conform to the BS7666 standard by Intelligent Addressing. However, the property database still contained approximately 2,000 errors.

“We initially tried to eliminate these errors manually, using spreadsheets!” said Katie Hogarth, DNA Coordinator at East Ayrshire Council. “It was soon apparent that this was unworkable, especially when we published the data on our website for feedback from residents. We reviewed a number of gazetteer management solutions and GGP NGz was simply the best product for our needs.”

Using GGP NGz East Ayrshire Council is maintaining a definitive list of postal addresses as well as non-postal land parcels and other features of interest; approximately 58,000 records in total. Through XML web services this data is already powering the Council’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, online services including a web based ‘Find my nearest’ and online mapping and essential back office systems such as CAPS UNI-Form used by Building Control. Future plans will see the data integrated with other essential services such as Planning, Housing and Environmental Health.

“GGP NGz is easy to use for the ongoing maintenance of the gazetteer and possibly of greater importance easy to integrate with other systems and services,” continued Katie. “This supports a wide range of Council business functions and underpins improved processes, customer services and operational efficiencies.”

GGP NGz is specifically designed to manage a Council’s address database; ensuring a consistent, up to date and accurate base for all property based information within an organisation. GGP NGz also manages the import and export of data between the local authority database and the national hub and the complete GGP NGz product suite was one of the first two software solutions to receive accreditation to the new national address standard BS7666.

Photgraph shows Margo Houston, Technical Support Manager (front) with Laura Smith, Planning Administrator (left), Katie Hogarth – DNA Co-ordinator (right) and Ian Park, Planning Technician

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

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