The problem

The Mine Subsidence Board operates in the coal mining region of New South Wales and is responsible for the reducing the risk of subsidence damage to properties by controlling the type of building and improvements being undertaken in subsidence areas. In the event of damage the MSB also manage the provision of compensation and repairs.

The MSB’s Information Management System (IMS) had become unreliable with district offices often unable to work effectively when the centralised system located in head office went down.

There was an urgent need to upgrade the MSB’s IMS while at the same time giving consideration to streamlining business processes and improving data access.

NGIS’ solution

NGIS had been appointed the Prime Contractor  of a consortium that included Alphawest, Pelion and Spatial Intelligence.

The MSB use a number of systems to plot and evaluate subsidence risk including a  Property Management System (PMS), Document   Management System and a Geographic Information System (GIS). All these systems needed to be integrated into the new IMS.

After evaluating MSB’s legacy systems, the following software was selected to make up the new, fully integrated IMS:

• ESRI’s ArcGIS suite
• Microsoft Windows and MS Office
• DocuMap
• Oracle 9i Enterprise Database.

A key feature of the new IMS is replicated databases (inc. a geodatabase), enabling remote offices to operate independently of one another. Achieved using a client/server architecture, the MSB now have a reliable, robust solution that allows district offices to maintain operations, even if the head office server were to go down.

The integration of the PMS with a GIS allows users to select an address and display it on a map interface that indicates areas of subsidence risk. DocuMap allows users to easily link documentation relating to that property for easy future access.

Benefits

There have been many benefits resulting from the deployment of the new IMS including:

• a more reliable system less prone to outages.
• increased workflow control, reducing duplication and the risk of errors.
  improved data accessibility.
• streamlined communication and reporting processes, with data being pulled straight from the system into Word templates and the ability to include a map where relevant.
• increased productivity as many paper-based tasks became automated within the system.
• improved customer service levels.
• being a scalable, component-based solution, additional functionality
  i.e. online applications, can be easily added.

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