Geographical Information System (GIS) solution provider AfriGIS has developed a palmtop application for the Land Bank of South Africa. The application is used in a handheld device for electronic data capturing and precision surveying of land.

The Land Bank is an agricultural development bank that provides financial services to a diverse range of clients. These include companies, trusts, established farmers and rural entrepreneurs.

"During the evaluation process of requests for agricultural loans, the Land Bank performs an asset assessment to establish the credibility and security on offer before the loan can be granted," explains Marius van der Merwe, new business development manager at AfriGIS. "Previously, these assessments were done on paper and depended heavily on 'guesstimates' made of the areas under question."

"Our field operatives would evaluate the properties, based primarily on what they saw. This information would then be captured by hand on numerous forms," says Bankies Malan, operations training manager at the Land Bank. "This done, the operatives would return to the office and re-capture the information onto the computer system. It was a laborious and time-consuming task, and the possibility for error was compounded owing to the double work that had to be carried out."

To alleviate these problems, AfriGIS developed a palmtop application using Embedded Visual Basic, running on the Windows CE platform.

"During field surveys, data is captured on the handheld device," Van der Merwe explains. "The palmtop application replicates the paper-based forms and also links with a GPS (global positioning system) that is used to measure areas on site.

"We also developed a link for data transfer from the palmtop to the Agricultural Risk Assessment spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel that is used to assess the loan applications," he continues. "The data is firstly transferred to a Microsoft Access database and then linked to the assessment spreadsheet, from where reports can be generated.

"With the new palmtop application, our workload has been reduced by half," says Malan. "Our operatives are now able to spend 75% of their time in the field, whereas previously most of their time was spent in the office."

AfriGIS

012 362 3114

www.afrigis.co.za