Forest Management Application: Improves Business Data Quality
Description
Customer
Scottish Woodlands
Challenge
Customer required a new system that would manage their business data more effectively.
Solution
Develop a desktop mapping application.
Results
Simplified process for data entry, improved data quality and reduced overheads.
Service
Consultancy : application development
Challenge
Scottish Woodlands provide a wide range of services connected with all forms of woodlands, tree and rural property. They manage over 170,000 hectares of woodland, valued in excess of £500m for more than 1500 clients, ranging from individuals to companies and government bodies.
Scottish Woodlands hold a wide range of data on every area of woodland that they are responsible for. As well as holding details of the species and age of the trees in each area, they also need to maintain information about access routes, and any hazards or constraints that may impact on the forestry operations such as overhead lines or historic monuments.
Furthermore, Scottish Woodlands has staff spread over 17 offices, responsible for managing data in their own area.
The forestry management company recognised that they needed a new system that would manage this data more effectively. Functional requirements included:
- Ability to work with multiple forests, compartments and sub compartments.
- Form based data entry, with the ability to update the attributes for many woodland sub-compartments at once, and enforce business rules.
- Ability to visualise woodland plans according to different criteria.
- Easy method for restructuring the current forest, reflecting changes due to felling or replanting.
- Tools that would enable staff to produce maps for felling, planting and other operations.
- System that could be easily accessed by multiple users across different offices.
Solution
Forth Valley GIS developed a desktop mapping application to meet the functional requirements specified by Scottish Woodlands. The application was developed as a toolbar add-in for ESRI’s ArcGIS desktop product.
Key features of the system included:
- Individual user login process to help control access to the application and data. Users can also be given access to geodatabases for other areas.
- Database level versioning of data was introduced allowing the user to manually “rollback” to a previous version in the event of any data errors.
- Developed using .NET technology to ensure continued support with ArcGIS 10+.
- Wizard driven processes were developed for common tasks such as map production and woodland restructuring.
- A tool was written allowing users to easily symbolise forest sub-compartments based on a number of key attributes, including tree species, age, soil type and slope.
- A toolbox utility was created to allow the administrator to merge the data for each office into a single snapshot geodatabase for centralised reporting purposes.
Once the data model was complete, Scottish Woodlands were then free to finish capturing the sub-compartment data for all of the woodlands they manage, and incorporate it into the new structure.
Results
By the end of the project, Scottish Woodlands had an application that shielded users from many of the complexities of ArcGIS, yet was cost effective enough to deploy across all 17 offices. Key benefits include:
- Custom attribute form simplifies data entry, minimising mistakes and enforcing business rules through use of drop-down lists and auto-calculated fields.
- Wizard-based approach to common tasks helps ensure consistent quality and appearance while maintaining flexibility for users.
- Custom symbology tool simplifies visualisation of sub-compartment data.
- Simplifying complex spatial tasks reduces training requirements and frees up more time for the users to concentrate on their main areas of expertise.
- Significant savings of time and cost in preparing various types of insurance and statutory documentation.
Conclusion
The introduction of this application has reduced the overhead of managing this key business data, increasing its value in the process and saved considerable amounts of staff time.