What does the implementation of Usemaps involve?

Software alone will not solve any problems.

True value emerges when people, data and knowledge are combined in processes that are supported by software.

And that’s what we call implementation.

A specific example

A company where approximately 20 people analysed locations for investments. Everyone worked in QGIS, making extensive use of the GIS Support Plugin. The process was as follows:

• information about potential plots of land reached analysts from various sources (from partners, owners, advertising portals, etc.)
• each analysed plots in their own area (in a similar but not uniform manner; some manually, some using scripts)
• if the location was ‘promising’, a PDF report was generated and sent by e-mail to the person responsible for making the decision.

It all took ages. The bottleneck was the people responsible for the assessment, because they asked a lot of additional questions (check the floodplains, is the plot next door for sale, etc.). Then the process started all over again…

The company purchased access to Usemaps (without implementation) and…

…mapped out their current workflow. Everyone had their own layer, and instead of generating PDFs in QGIS, they did it in Usemaps. A small profit.

Rescue mission

As part of our ‘rescue mission,’ we examined how the company operates. We mapped out the process and made improvements:

1. Each ‘landhunter’ did not work on their own layer, but rather a single layer was created with a division of responsibilities (each had specific counties under their jurisdiction).
2. There was no PDF generation, only status manipulation. The manager received an e-mail every time someone marked a plot for approval. The object card contained all the data he needed to make a decision. The decision was also a status change, in accordance with the workflow.
3. The manager was trained in Usemaps (2 hours), so he learned how to enable/disable additional layers, which eliminated additional requests that caused confusion.

 

The entire process took exactly 56 hours (information from the invoice).

Result? Benefit?

1. Restriction to zero sending of emails (other than automatic ones)
2. Several times faster processing for a single location
3. Ability to automatically monitor the decision-making process
4. The ability to monitor the number of plots acquired.

What else?

Already during this implementation, the participants themselves began to notice other areas that could be improved using Usemaps. These will be implemented independently or together with GIS Support. We will see!