Wayne County and The City of Richmond

Wayne County and The City of Richmond case study provided by Cannon IV, a Flex Technology Group company

Wayne County and The City of Richmond

“Our satisfaction with Cannon IV began with maintenance. When you purchase from many of the vendors all you get is the manufacturer’s maintenance plan, but with Cannon IV you get much more. We’re very pleased with their commitment to providing local support and would be happy to bid them again!” 

Shaun Scholer

GIS Manager, Wayne County

Read the Full Success Story: Wayne County and the City of Richmond

PREVIOUS SOLUTIONS

A city’s infrastructure contains many more elements than first meet the eye. Wires running overhead or in underground conduits, carry electricity, telephone, cable TV, and other vital services. Water lines, sewer lines, gas lines, and even transportation tunnels weave under city streets. And storm drains, fire hydrants, street lamps, and other items play key roles in public safety and government services.

Cities run best when they know where each one of those items – and more – are located. From new construction to emergency response, precise information about utilities, property lines, road surfaces, and other features help accelerate planning, permitting, construction, and service delivery. That’s why all levels of government, all across the country, rely on geographic information system (GIS) to record, visualize and understand the position and relationship of terrain and improvement features on, above, and under their local landscape.

The staff realized they were working with a roomful of maps and plans, most kept in flat files and copied as needed on an old blue-line machine or an 11-by-17 inch photocopier in the hallway, with each successive generation getting darker and harder to read.

Old equipment and manual processes made maps and drawings hard to find and cumbersome to share – two obstacles for which GIS is an ideal solution. But first, the employees knew they had to digitize all those images for use with their ESRI ArcGIS system. And they wanted to keep that work in-house, because an earlier experience in sending documents out to a scanning contractor had been costly and inconvenient since it meant being without the documents until they could be returned.

When the elected officials, engineers and planners in Wayne County and the city of Richmond, Indiana chose to explore GIS solutions, one of the vendors they called was Cannon IV. 

OUR SOLUTIONS

The Cannon IV team worked with the client to develop an in-house solution for scanning, printing, sharing and archiving large format documents.

The group selected an HP Designjet Z3100ps 44-inch Color Photo Printer paired with an HP Designjet HD 42- inch Large Format Color Scanner as the best solution for their needs. The combination would allow them to scan documents from individual sheets to pre-mounted maps on boards up to one half inch thick. From these scans, they would then be able to produce high-resolution prints on various materials with smooth, sharp backgrounds that help lettering and other details stand out clearly.

Cannon IV’s installation team delivered the equipment and stayed until the government staff was confident with its operation and maintenance. Training covered subjects including optimal DPI settings for different source documents and printer settings for various materials. And after as much as six hours of service during the installation, the Cannon IV team came back a few weeks later to ensure none of those skills had been forgotten.

OUTCOMES AND KEY BENEFITS

Beeson reports that the new solution has made scanning and printing much easier than before. Getting more documents into the GIS system has also helped boost efficiency for customers inside and outside of city and county government. As an added bonus, users are also able to take advantage of a rich collection of historical photos stored within the system.

These initiatives, combined with their printing and imaging solution, have earned accolades, including the 2011 Excellence in GIS award from the Indiana GIS Council for the system’s benefits in environmental studies, documenting historical sites, tracking vegetation growth, and charting river and runoff trends. Of course, the scanning and printing solution isn’t all there is to the city and county’s GIS system, but it has significantly contributed to the team’s overall success.

Business Benefits

  • Richer GIS imagery
  • Faster printing turnaround
  • Lower scanning costs
  • Increased access to GIS related maps and documents
  • Retire older, obsolete equipment