At the Smart Geospatial Solutions Conference 2017 Krzysztof Sidor from LGI (operating in CEE countries under the UPC brand) gave a presentation “The role of the reference address database in intensive investment processes”. LGI has networks in 14 countries, mainly in Europe (CEE region, but also Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, UK, Irleand) and in South America. Currently, LGI is developing its global network under the project Network Expansion. In his presentation Krzysztof focused on challenges and IT support of investment processes related to the network expansion conducted by UPC Polska.
Most important parts of the investment process
At the initial stage of the process (i.e. when choosing areas for investment) it’s necessary to combine current network data with information about population and competitors. Up-to-date information about the network is retrieved from the Smallworld Physical Network Inventory (PNI) system. Other essential data needed at this stage include demographic information of more than 7 million buildings. This data is loaded into BOB – a custom application developed by Globema to UPC Polska. BOB is a referential database of addresses.
During network design, construction and final acceptance phase all investment tasks are being outsourced, so monitoring the subcontractors becomes essential. BOB application provides means to access and edit selected data related to the specific project. What’s more, the integrated PNI & BOB solution ensures the quality of address data even during the change from the address of investment to the official one. The quality of such data is crucial when selling services and connecting new customers.
BOB supporting the investment process
In the second part of the his presentation Krzysztof focused on main features of BOB software. The application was built on Oracle and operates in a web browser. Its database consists of 7 million addresses combined with additional demographics data. The software provides enhanced mechanisms for searching buildings’ addresses by attributes. The application also allows to add any attributes to a specific building or group of buildings. Thanks to that, UPC can gather data required by specific departments involved in the investment process. Globema’s software can be also used by third parties as access restriction mechanisms are available at the attribute level. BOB integrated with PNI supports advanced operations conducted on addresses, such as splitting and merging. PNI also feeds BOB with information about distance from each building to the nearest part of the network. BOB displays addresses (along with their status) on Google Maps.
Krzysztof summarized his presentation by listing benefits of BOB implementation and indicated plans for its further development and further implementation in other CEE subsidiaries of the UPC company. BOB application supports the entire investment process by providing consistent information about addresses along with the ability to quickly gather different data. Direct benefits can be achieved by reducing the effort needed to maintain information about addresses and more effective implementation of a large number of investment projects. The significance of the reference address database will be appreciated by everyone who encountered issues related to addresses data flow between various IT systems in a large enterprise.
