Surrey Heath Borough Council To Boost Efficiency With GGP Software

Croydon, 03 November 2010 - Surrey Heath Borough Council is set to boost the efficiency of local services with new software that simplifies access to council information. The award winning Gazetteer Management Software from Croydon based GGP Systems will help the Council integrate their centralised property database with front and back office systems such as Council Tax, the Electoral Register and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software supplied by Lagan.

James Rutter, GIS Manager at Surrey Heath Borough Council (Camberley, UK) - rapid access to public records is being made easier thanks to software from GGP Systems. The software, GGP NGz, will also be used by the Camberley based Council for the day to day management of the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG).  The NLPG is a national address database, kept up to date by local councils, that provides a unique ID for every single property in England and Wales and allows different public information to be connected together and shared.

Surrey Heath carefully appraised what it considered to be the best market offerings and selected GGP NGz based on price and functionality. The open database schema was of significant importance to the Council as was the compatibility with SQL Server 2008. The ‘as standard’ reporting and utility tools offered by GGP NGz also contributed to the Council’s decision as did the fact that the mapping system behind the product was GGP’s own rather than based on a third party system.

“Our previous set up was difficult to work with and although our database is of a good standard with the additional tools offered by GGP NGz we hope to achieve a ‘Gold’ standard shortly,” commented James Rutter, GIS Manager at Surrey Heath Borough Council. “Using GGP NGz we can ‘expose’ the gazetteer to more departments and back office systems, which in turn will further improve the quality and accuracy of the data and deliver real improvements in service delivery and hopefully costs savings and efficiency gains.”

“I knew, virtually as soon as I had seen the software in action, that GGP NGz was the solution for us,” continued Rutter, “and the fact that users of GGP software recently scooped five out of 6 awards at the 2010 NLPG Exemplar Awards has enforced this belief. Using GGP NGz we are hoping to do some interesting spatial analysis and plugging the gazetteer data into our GIS should be a lot easier than it is at present.”

GGP NGz software has been specifically developed to ensure 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 databases and the NLPG, the national hub, and the complete product suite was one of the first two software solutions to receive accreditation for address data transfer (DTF 7.3) and is fully compliant with BS7666.

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