Case Study - Ian Holdsworth Chartered Surveyors

Easement Support System

Problem

The company carries out easement and wayleave surveying activities for other companies. The work is regional and national, so surveyors are quite often away from the base office.

A mechanism was required to provide timely work requirements to the surveyors, and provide methods for them to update the work details, adding tasks undertaken, and resource costs.

Solution

The solution was to build a workflow management system, tailored to easement surveying activities.

A remote internet web server was used to host a database application to which all staff will have remote access.

A database was designed for SQL Server to store the information in a normalised and logically ordered fashion.

Browser-based screens were designed for the website, to provide a front-end to the database. This provides view and manual update facitlities to the database.

An ODBC connector was implemented to provide secure access to the database for data analysis.

Backup regimes were instituted with a method to archive the data. This can be downloaded securely by the customer, on demand.

Usage

Data is now available on any browser configured to be able to access it. Username and password authentication is used. Secure sockets were deemed to be not required in this environment.

Administrators and survey staff have different access levels. Surveyors can only view and update their own jobs. Administrators can update all surveyors' tasks as well as other system data such as lookup tables.

The data is used to provide resource costing reports, using iCraft's web-based reporting technology, and MS Office products.

Additionally the company use the system to provide status reports to its own customers.