By Dan Castaneda
With a simple map made using GIS, the Dakota County Operations Department is able to save hundreds of dollars on deliveries. The Dakota County Government Center complex in Hastings is a large four-building campus covering several acres. The four buildings are the Administrative Center, the Judicial Center, the Juvenile Center, and the Jail and Sheriff’s offices. Each one of these buildings has its own unique address, and accepts several deliveries throughout the year, which can cause problems when ordering products.
Typically, when someone like you or I orders something and has it delivered to our house, it ships to one location, to a single building with a single address. This, however, is not the case at the Government Center in Hastings. Often, one delivery will contain several items that need to be shipped to two or more buildings. By combining several items on one order, the Operations Department can save money on shipping. But because each building has its own address, the person coordinating the delivery has no idea that all four buildings belong to the same campus, which can lead to higher shipping charges, usually one fee per address.
In order to help solve this problem, the Office of GIS was asked to create a simple map of the Government Center. The map contains the 2008 aerial photo, and has labels for the
surrounding roads and for each building. Also incorporated into the map were the oblique aerial views that were provided from the Pictometry imagery. The oblique images were included to help vendors recognize what the front of each building looks like, since the aerial photo only shows the buildings from above.
Now, when someone in the Operations Department places an order that includes shipping to various buildings, they can provide the map to the vendor to show them that all of the buildings are on the same campus, avoiding what would otherwise have been extra charges for shipping to multiple addresses. In fact, this was proven valuable during a recent delivery of office furniture, where the County saved $175 in shipping charges.
Even though this was a simple map to create, its usefulness will continue to pay off long into the future. This type of map demonstrates a basic example of what GIS can be used for, and how it can help save money by showing the geographic location of buildings.