“De Vlaamse Waterweg” manages a particularly dense waterway network, valuable for economy, nature, recreation and tourism. An efficient management is therefore essential. To this end, project and document information must be organised in a uniform and integrated way. Crucial in an environment where decisions have to be made quickly about large budgets such as the purchase of plots of land along banks and canals.
SWIM: Mapping the Flemish waterways
The Flemish Waterway is a large institution with several departments. Files, but also projects, documents, tasks and data, must be managed and stored in a uniform manner. The underlying processes must be standardised.
Challenge
What are project and property locations? Which plots do we purchase to guarantee optimal water management? Is there a colleague in the vicinity of my work area working on another file? All questions that need to be answered as quickly and effectively as possible.
Using the geographical aspect is an asset here. After all, the location forms a link between projects and plots.
Solution
Geo Solutions developed a tool that clearly shows all the variables on which decisions are based. Everything is bundled in one efficient collaboration platform: a link between a GIS and SharePoint platform. Employees of De Vlaamse Waterweg can easily enter, view and change information here. This platform not only optimizes cooperation between colleagues and departments, but also ensures that decisions can be made more quickly. In addition, a specific project portal was developed which also allows cooperation with third parties, such as contractors.
Result
The collaboration platform consists of a link between an MS SharePoint platform on which, among other things, file information is stored and a GIS platform on which spatial information is gathered. For the creation of this collaboration platform GeoSolutions’ GIS expertise was combined with SharePoint expertise from another company within Cronos (Ventigrate). The best of both worlds was used and seamlessly integrated with each other.
In the GIS platform, spatial information about land is completed with structurally and uniformly stored related data (attributes). Integration with the SharePoint platform is very useful here. After all, land can be linked to certain project, while projects usually also have a spatial component. At a glance you can see (and look up) what is being done by De Vlaamse Waterweg in a certain region: files, projects, land, etcetera.
