Geospatially Enabling the Dutch Ministry of Finance Named Top Project in “Geospatial Innovation” Category
EXTON, Pa. – The Dutch Ministry of Finance has won a 2007 BE Award in the “Geospatial Innovation” category for its creation of an integrated Bentley GIS-SAP solution for the management of publicly owned real estate.
Said Sebastiaan Sintemaartensdijk, senior business consultant, State Property Service of the Dutch Ministry of Finance, “Managing real estate without geospatial data makes it extremely difficult to make sound business decisions that lead to maximum revenues. The aggressive return on investment we are anticipating from our Bentley GIS-SAP solution will largely result from our new ability to access accurate and complete administrative and GIS data on all of our properties in a matter of seconds. This will allow us to quickly calculate the true value of the real estate holdings we manage and lead to substantial additional revenues over the coming years.”
The State Property Service manages land assets totaling almost 4 million acres, a diverse collection of buildings, including government buildings, educational, health care, and military facilities, and historical buildings, as well as harbors and roads. One of the agency’s key responsibilities is to achieve an optimal return on these assets for the government and the Dutch people through rental agreements, long-term leases, or sales.
Prior to the implementation of the new Bentley GIS-SAP solution, the State Property Service had no way to electronically integrate its administrative real estate data with GIS data and to view both in a single interface. As a result, it was difficult to assess what land or which buildings were available for lease, rent, or sale, or to determine whether conflicting contracts were associated with a parcel of land or building. Likewise, associating cadastral parcels with data such as lot size, square footage, or value (based on location) could only be done by referencing paper documents, which often resulted in errors.
In 2003, the Dutch Ministry of Finance implemented SAP Real Estate, a system for managing the administrative side of the properties under lease, rental agreement, or scheduled for sale or purchase. This enabled the State Property Service to efficiently manage all land and facilities using SAP, but the agency still couldn’t visualize location and geospatial data in context within its workflows.
The new Bentley GIS-SAP solution added this critical missing element. With this innovative, integrated solution, the management of tens of thousands of state properties and facilities and millions of parcels of land became spatially enabled. All business entities in SAP are now visualized “on the fly” in a highly detailed map in the SAP browser.
Several Bentley products are at the core of this system. The Bentley Geospatial Server is used to store all property documentation and parcel information and currently contains data on 2.5 million cadastral parcels in vector format, raster basemaps in three different scales, plus data on more than 60,000 real estate properties and 20,000 user rights.
Bentley PowerMap is used to edit the GIS data and Bentley Geo Web Publisher is used to present the cadastral information to the user in a Web browser. The integration process was facilitated by the underlying flexibility of the XML Feature Modeling (XFM) technology and a solutions-based approach from Bentley’s Professional Services organization.
The combination of administrative and geospatial data and information delivers important business information and helps optimize the support of business processes. By comparing properties versus usage of land, including referencing other data sources, the State Property Service is now able to quickly define the best return on investment. It can optimize property usage through buying, selling, and using land while taking into account environmental, legal, political, and social restrictions. These functions and the related information are key factors in real estate management, and this new system will generate higher revenues from the land base and assets owned by the Dutch government.
Because of the collaboration offered by the new solution, a single department can now handle all of the work, minimizing labor costs. Once all legacy data is imported into the system, maintenance of data and maps can be conducted by six to eight staff members rather than the 15 it used to require.
In addition to the anticipated increase in revenues it is expecting from the ability to quickly calculate the true value of the real estate holdings, the State Property Service is seeing the following benefits from its new solution:
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A reduction in labor and material costs due to the removal of paper from the system
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Savings due to better cooperation between government departments (as a result of data being sent electronically instead of as paper files)
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Increased revenues from more accurate calculations of land areas that have been revealing property areas 3 to 5 percent bigger than the values specified in the contracts
Going forward, the addition of a further 5 million cadastral parcels of the Netherlands and several new thematic information layers to the Bentley Geospatial Server will enable the State Property Service to support political decision making, improve real estate management, and the exchange of geospatial information in real time with other governmental real estate organizations. This enabling of interoperation will lead to a single, integrated governmental real estate information system.
For more information on the Dutch Ministry of Finance’s winning project and all of the other 2007 BE Award projects, visit www.be.org/awards. For more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit www.bentley.com/Geospatial.
About the BE Awards
The BE Awards of Excellence, which are judged by an independent panel of industry experts and presented at an evening ceremony during the annual BE Conference (www.be.org), honor the extraordinary work of Bentley users improving the world’s infrastructure. These projects set benchmarks for their industries and showcase the imagination and technical mastery of the organizations that created them.
About the Dutch Ministry of Finance
The Dutch Ministry of Finance plays a central role in shaping the financial and economic policy of the Netherlands. It keeps track of the revenue and expenditure of Central Government and monitors the sum total, while each department is responsible for its own expenditure. It monitors the integrity and stability of the financial markets, protects the consumer, and oversees securities transactions. One of its many duties is to devise procedures for cooperation between the government and the market in investment projects. For more information go to www.minfin.nl/en/home.
About Bentley
Bentley Systems, Incorporated provides software for the lifecycle of the world’s infrastructure. The company’s comprehensive portfolio for the building, plant, civil, and geospatial verticals spans architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) and operations. With revenues now surpassing $400 million annually, and more than 2400 colleagues globally, Bentley is the leading provider of AEC software to the Engineering News-Record Top Design Firms and major owner-operators, and was named the world’s No. 2 provider of GIS/geospatial software solutions in a recent Daratech research study.
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