The challenge
Savills is a global multi-disciplinary firm of Chartered Surveyors advising clients on all aspects of property management, development and transactions. Founded in the UK in 1855, Savills is one of the world’s leading property agents. Their experience and expertise spans the globe, with over 600 offices across America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Their scale means they have a wealth of wide-ranging specialist and local knowledge, allowing them to provide forward thinking and practical advice to help individuals, businesses and institutions make better property decisions.
Savills’ Infrastructure team specialises in providing land referencing and land assembly services to clients across the UK. A key part of the process, and a critical early step in any development project, is identifying people and organisations that have a legal interest in land or property and compiling the details of those interests. The company was keen to reduce the time spent on this traditionally labour intensive, research-heavy yet crucial workload. Finding a reliable and up-to-date alternative to the variety of maps, trackers, emails and legacy systems used was imperative to allow Savills to save time and money.
To deliver a more effective land agency service, Savills wanted to develop a user-friendly, map-driven, digital project platform that could streamline the process. It also needed to be scalable to support expected growth.
“Our clients like SMART and see the benefits it brings, including helping mitigate challenges like information silos. Now, information is available for everyone on the project team to access – thereby reducing the risks associated with a single point of failure or the need for multiple local systems.”
Eleanor Mair,
GIS Manager,
Savills
The solution
thinkWhere’s core GIS Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, groundMapper, was used to create the Savills Mapping and Referencing Tracker – SMART.
Tailoring groundMapper to the needs of the Savills team, SMART is a collaborative, secure, map-driven, cloud-based solution that supports multi-projects and multi-users with permission-driven access to content from a single source.
groundMapper also provides direct access to a rich catalogue of definitive third party open datasets used as part of Savills land assembly work.
The rollout
In SMART, the core groundMapper system was developed and extended in a modular fashion, to produce an innovative solution that delivered an integrated digital projects platform. As groundMapper is hosted in the cloud, it provided the perfect solution for SMART users working remotely – providing the team with a hub for projects without the need for traditional on-premise infrastructure.
Training and support was provided to key members of the Savills team for wider rollout throughout the company.
Today, SMART helps the team at Savills work together more efficiently with colleagues, clients and other stakeholders working on land assembly projects.
A smart and efficient solution
With groundMapper and SMART, Savills has significantly increased its project efficiency. Teams no longer need to spend as much time looking for essential information in email accounts or remote file locations and data can be readily uploaded, accessed cross-referenced and downloaded.
Using the power of thinkWhere’s geospatial data platform, theMapCloud, Savills also benefits from direct access to third party project data as a service, increasing operational efficiency.
Project engagement has become much more effective with stakeholders able to self-serve information from a single source of definitive and authoritative data, generating a much stronger sense of ownership, trust and buy-in across the supply chain.
“For Savills it was a case of build something from scratch, costing a lot and taking a lot of time, or harness the power of groundMapper – an established cloud GIS product on which to extend the capabilities. As groundMapper progresses through roadmap development, Savills will continue to reap these ongoing benefits from our product investment.”
Alan Moore,
Head of Geospatial Services,
thinkWhere
