ASSET MANAGEMENT
Cutting costs withGIS W
Ian Carter
ith the pressure on budgets and resources in the
current climate, local authorities are increasingly looking for ways of cutting costs. With the need to protect frontline services wherever possible and deliver more with less, everyone is trying to find ways of ways of working more efficiently.
Geographic Information Systems using Ordnance Survey data provided under the Mapping Services Agreement can often make it easy to see ways of looking at things differently.
It seems as if lots of authorities are coming up with innovative and ingenious ways of saving money – from sharing resources and outsourcing services. Although no amount of efficiency gains will stop cuts, they can limit the impact and geographic information can help to find more efficient ways of doing things.
There appears to be increasing interest in the power of geography to visualise and interpret information. Many local authorities are already harnessing the power of GI and the concept of location to reduce their costs.
Ian Carter, head of local government at Ordnance Survey, says: “We are increasingly seeing geographic information used to find efficiencies and savings. It can be used everywhere across the council from planning and highways maintenance to children’s & young peoples services and can have a big impact on the cost-effectiveness of frontline service delivery.”
GIS can enable authorities 46 pse
to access, present and share information in a way that makes immediate sense to people and in a timely and accurate fashion.
“In many cases, the services provided by local authorities are so complex and interwoven that geography can be the only meaningful way of visualising them,” continues Ian.
Cardiff Council’s schools transport team has used geographic information in the form of Ordnance Survey’s OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network Layer and Capita One’s Route Optimisation application to deliver savings of more than £1.3 million.
The council is responsible for an area of 120 square miles with 140 schools. The team manages the transportation of 3,500 mainstream pupils and 840 with special transport needs. Faced with increasing costs and the needs to promote sustainable travel and transport, the team needed to find a way to reducing carbon emissions, time and costs whilst letting and managing contracts more efficiently.
The council was able to link the information on routes, vehicles, stops and pupil postcodes. Once gathered, the data was displayed on two adjacent maps – one showing the needs and the other the existing route allocation. Planners could then group the pupils together based on their needs or location. The system then adjusts the routes to determine the new journey time and cost.
Doing this allowed the council to cut 1,200 miles a day from their overall journeys to school resulting in a need for 40
fewer vehicles. The resulting contract re-negotiation based on individual optimised routes has saved time and money.
OS MasterMap is part of a package of mapping data products available to all local authorities under the Mapping Services Agreement.
Ian Carter says: “Location information can be useful in so many ways across authorities and it can be a case of accessing the data that authorities already have.”
Hampshire County Council made use of geographic information to join up
information across departments for emergency planning during the prolonged snowfall this winter.
Although well prepared, the Sep/Oct 10
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