Flagship Housing Group selects Pitney Bowes MapInfo for wide-reaching growth management

Location intelligence tools to deliver effective Land Terrier and enhanced customer services at East Anglia’s largest provider of affordable homes

Windsor, 6 August 2008 – Pitney Bowes MapInfo, the leading global provider of location intelligence solutions, today announces that it has won a contract with Flagship Housing Group to implement a sophisticated asset management system to deliver wide-reaching management and customer service efficiencies throughout the organisation.

With the deployment of PlanWeb™, a powerful browser-based corporate intranet GIS solution, together with MapInfo Professional® 9.5, Flagship Housing Group aims to initially establish a world-class Land Terrier covering the 20,000-plus homes in its portfolio.  The highly intuitive, interactive system will enable the organisation to produce visual, up-to-the-minute data records to enable Community Managers and the Contact Centres to deal effectively with customers, planners, regulators and mobile workers.

“The Pitney Bowes MapInfo solution is a great fit for Flagship” said Colin Daine, Head of Business Solutions.  “We’re a Systems Thinking organisation, focused on approaching operatiofns from a customer perspective, renowned for outstanding customer service – and getting it right the first time.

“This system will give us a ubiquitous capability to respond to customers at the point of need, from visitors to reception to asset management and contact centres, and out in the field through mobile devices.  We expect over 150 of our IT users across the Group to deliver tangible benefits from this unprecedented visual access at their fingertips.”

“The combined capability of PlanWeb™ and MapInfo Professional® delivers a tailor-made solution to address the burgeoning needs of housing associations, enabling swift and accurate action whilst reducing operational costs and driving efficiencies,” said Louise Watts, Sales Manager, Local Government UK & Ireland of Pitney Bowes MapInfo.

“We’re delighted to have secured this contract with Flagship and excited about the potential of the system to deliver tangible benefits across the organisation once it’s fully deployed.”

Once the Land Terrier is deployed, Flagship expects to realise significantly broader capabilities from the system in respect of sharing information with partners, like the police relating to anti-social behaviour, for potential development opportunities and in working with regulators.

“We selected Pitney Bowes MapInfo for this project because their proposition clearly supported our exemplar code of practice.  Combined with its ease of use, unparalleled web-based functionality and ability to seamlessly roll out across the Group, we believe we’ve made the best possible decision to enable us to achieve our vision of benchmark standards of service and operations,” concluded Daine.