The Client
Straddling two counties with a population of more than 140,000, Mid Ulster District Council (MUDC) provides local services to a diverse population spread across both rural and urban communities.
The Problem
One of the many services MUDC provides is the collection of trade waste from 250 sites across the Dungannon area. Although the collection of waste is completed regularly, the actual amount of waste collected varied greatly from truck to truck and route to route. Information from the individual routes, including the amount of waste collected was collated by the council on Excel spreadsheets.
MUDC required the digitisation of this data to allow then to present it on a map for analysis. This would enable their GIS officer to optimise collection routes dependent on location, weight and type of waste. The data itself had no latitude or longitude coordinates but was a collection of addresses that were not formatted correctly to be imported directly into a GIS.
What MUDC Did
By using Azimap, the GIS staff at MUDC never had to leave the digitisation workflow to complete this task. This enabled them to increase productivity by 80% compared to using similar processes on the council’s propriety GIS. The task of undertaking this project within Azimap, simply involved:
- Importing a non spatial CSV into Azimap as a new layer
- Choosing which attributes are ‘editable’ & ‘required’ dependent on the data
- Saving this layer and showing it on a map
- Plotting trade waste sites on the map via a simple address search within Azimap
- Editing the database table entries within Azimap as required
- Never having to leave the Azimap digitisation workflow process
- Saving and Exporting the data out of Azimap in their required spatial format
The Benefits
- Quick and simple process which anyone could complete
- Significantly reduce the hours required to complete this time–consuming work
- Allowed staff more time to complete advanced GIS analysis
- Data was easily exported to MUDC’s preferred spatial format
- No incomplete records due to completion of ‘required field’ attributes