Off the wall or on the wall – Customised Mapping has the answer

Where would you turn if you wanted a detailed wall map the size of a small room? Or a set of maps showing the outlines of UK counties as they were fifty years ago? Or a map mounted on metal sheet?

In every case, the answer could be a specialist company called Customised Mapping Limited. As founder and managing director David Yelland puts it: “We tend to get calls from people saying ‘I don’t suppose you could help me, but..” He adds: “The answer is nearly always yes.”

At the core of the company’s activities is GeoConcept, the digital mapping and geographic information system from MapMechanics.

“That’s the bedrock of our business,” says David Yelland. “One of GeoConcept’s great strengths is that it is effective both for map-based business analysis, and for the presentation and output of maps for reproduction in print – the two main strands of our business. Whatever the requirements, GeoConcept is the right tool to handle them.”

One of the company’s latest commissions, the requirement for county outlines, was prompted by an enquiry from a TV quiz show. David Yelland explains: “We found that modern-day county boundary definitions weren’t really appropriate to the show’s requirements, so we had to go back to the boundaries prior to the 1972 Local Government Act. But as there was no readily-available digital dataset of these, we had to create one ourselves, using old maps and GeoConcept.”

Customised Mapping can be as small as maps printed in guide books or posted on web sites, or big enough for public display. In between the two, the company produces maps for presentations, reports and exhibition stands.

A long-standing involvement by the company has been in generating maps for the market-leading Alan Rogers’ Guides to camping and caravanning sites around Europe, a series of A5-sized books that are produced annually in six regional editions and two languages (English and Dutch).

“We are given a database of inspected and approved camp site locations, which used to be derived from postcodes, but are nowadays generated by GPS satellite-based location plots, and we overlay them on outline maps of the tourist areas for the country or set of countries.”

David Yelland says GeoConcept is particularly effective in generating maps for print, since it can output them in EPS file format, which is widely used in the world of graphic design.

In terms of business analysis, Customised Mapping specialises in tasks such as analysing optimum supply points for and performing “find nearest” calculations. For one client, the Quarry Products Association, the company has handled many exercises such as plotting member locations in relation to political constituencies, and planning educational programmes by identifying members nearest to specific schools.

It has done similar work in a variety of markets, notably for Citizens Advice, for which it has plotted concentrations of activities in external locations such as hospitals, health centres and prisons.

The company also takes on exercises involving territory management, commonly using postcode data (both UK and European) to identify specific areas and display related information against them. Recently it handled a project which involved producing price schedules for a European distribution organisation – in this case basing the presentation on a map backdrop using postcodes produced from its own research.

“Usually our clients already have most of the underlying business data they need,” David Yelland says, “but often they haven’t found a way to present and analyse it effectively. It’s a familiar story, but basically we bring the data to life.”

Complex data is usually stored and manipulated in a Microsoft Access database, from which GeoConcept can use it smoothly and seamlessly, with its direct ODBC functionality. If necessary, the company augments client data with bought-in business or demographic datasets from MapMechanics

“We’re particularly effective where clients want a mapping or GIS job handled quickly, especially if it is a little out of the ordinary,” David Yelland says. This means, he explains, that Customised Mapping has a role to play with quite large organisations, even when they have their own in-house GIS function, as well as with smaller businesses for which it would not be economical to have such a resource in-house.

“Part of our expertise is knowing the right suppliers to handle tasks such as outputting map on unfamiliar materials, handling very large maps, and laminating them or providing specialist finishing.”

Several of these skills were brought together in one project for Dorset Police, who wanted a two detailed county wall maps mounted on a metal sheet. At the other end of the scale, the company often generates simple “how to find us” maps for businesses to post on their web sites.