Millar & Bryce
and thinkWhere

Fuelling growth with an innovative cloud-based information service
for land referencing.

A partnership with thinkWhere helped Millar & Bryce launch a new service that’s delivering real business benefits for its land referencing clients.


The challenge
Millar & Bryce wanted to use technology more strategically to streamline and drive efficiencies in the way it manages geospatial data for its land referencing work — an information-intensive process of identifying anyone who may be affected by a proposed property development, with details of their interest in the land. Millar & Bryce was especially keen to see how it might use geographic information systems in a more automated way to support its business applications.

The solution
Millar & Bryce had already worked with thinkWhere on an award-winning project that successfully streamlined its workflows for land investigation and stakeholder engagement and had delivered an impressive £250,000 in savings. The companies engaged again in a wide-ranging Discovery workshop where thinkWhere analysed Millar & Bryce’s overall approach to data management for geographic information.

“With thinkWhere, we know we’re working with the leading-edge technical experts in the geographic information field. Their skillset is unique, and their experience and knowledge are second to none.”

Gary Donaldson,
Business Development Manager,
Millar & Bryce

The rollout
The ultimate output was a customised version of the flagship groundMapper platform, letting Millar & Bryce bundle all documentation pertinent to a project and publish it to a web viewer. The solution, comprising a custom data loading tool created by thinkWhere, reduced a one-week process to 48 hours. Published data is now ready for Millar & Bryce’s own Quality Assurance team to begin its checks, before data is released to clients at a private URL. Based in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud and drawing in updated, third-party geographic data maintained in a managed service from thinkWhere, the solution is highly scalable, allowing Millar & Bryce to serve a large number of clients concurrently.

An innovative service for Millar & Bryce clients
The web viewer from thinkWhere has significantly improved internal efficiencies but also delivered time savings for Millar & Bryce clients, who can now see pertinent land referencing information sooner. This means they can make more informed decisions faster, in regards to design options for planned developments. Millar & Bryce have now made the groundMapper-based web viewer the centerpiece of its new Site Assembly Solutions service, giving Millar & Bryce important differentiation in a competitive market for land referencing.

Cataloguing historic aerial imagery with NCAP

Curating snapshots of the UK with the British Library

thinkWhere supports Scottish Government’s R100 programme