“Caxton Local Media recently extended their CMA (Caxton Mapping Application) service and maintenance agreement with AfriGIS for the next two years until 2020. This comes after the successful development in implementing and hosting the Spatial Analysis Tool; a Field Capturing solution, that is integrated in the form of a mobile application, written specifically for this purpose by AfriGIS.
Caxton Local Media partnered with AfriGIS and embarked on the process of setting up a centralised, hosted spatial data warehouse environment to be accessed by everyone in the Caxton group.
The environment consists of the following:
- Fieldwork Mobile Application
- Web Based Analysis Tool
- Spatial Analysis Server
This information is business-critical as this has a direct impact on print orders, distribution quantities and bulk deliveries.
The Fieldwork Application that is used by contractors automatically captures the location with GPS coordinates, of the Bulk Distribution Points and more than 60,000 points have already been captured and verified to date. Crucial distribution information on Bulk Delivery/Distribution Points are captured as:
- Type (Complex, Business or Institution)
- Security Type (No Security, Night Security, Day Security and 24Hour Security)
- Delivery to Gate (Inside, Outside, Post-box, Caretaker, Individual Stores and Bulk Stores)
The Web based analysis tool, with predefined user roles, is for the:
- Viewing of Spatial data/information on a map (that includes Suburbs, Cadastre, Street Centre Lines, Points of Interest, Bulk Delivery/Distribution points and Caxton Layers)
- Selecting of layers for reporting purposes
- Capturing and resolving complaints
- Uploading of Confirmation Letters
- Printing of maps to .pdf’s
The Spatial Analysis Server was put in place to ensure that accurate and up to date Footprint and Dropsheet reports can be viewed and exported from the system. This information is business-critical as this has a direct impact on print orders, distribution quantities and bulk deliveries.
The benefits of the CMA to Caxton Local Media are tremendous as can be seen by the following achievements:
- Cost savings – resulting in greater efficiency
- Better decision making
- Improved communication
- Better geographic information record keeping
- Managing geographically
Caxton Local Media is very excited about the next two years where we will see more focus being placed on our Route planning and optimisation from a distribution perspective. The latest edition of the Roots Survey (South Africa’s largest urban community survey) dataset to the CMA reporting features, together with the Census Information of 1996, 2001 & 2011, will make the CMA one of the most powerful sales tools in the organisation.”
