Anyone who routinely makes critical decisions or who is called on to respond quickly will appreciate the importance of having access to information. Such is the case when an insurance adjuster is called on to respond to an incident or natural disaster. Where did the incident occur? Who was affected? Are there policy holders in the area? How do I get to the incident location? All these questions must be answered without delay. GIS is a critical tool for processing this type of information and for providing a means to answer the pressing questions. Unfortunately traditional GIS solutions have been designed to be used by highly skilled GIS professionals, whose services are overburdened during a time of crisis resulting in a delay in getting the relevant data to the people who need it most. Such was the case when a tornado touched down in a residential area in the southeast U.S. Without access to GIS tools, the responding adjusters had to depend on locating each policy holder’s address on a paper map which was then use to estimate whether or not the he or she was within the affected area.
Solution:
GIS is no longer exclusively a tool for highly trained professionals; increasingly non-GIS professionals are adopting advanced mapping tools to empower their decision-making process. XMap 5.0 GIS Enterprise offers a variety of powerful GIS tools that can be used by virtually anyone. An insurance company can easily apply a GIS solution without depending on someone outside of their organization. First, policy holders can be geo-coded or plotted on the map so that their critical data is literally tagged to their location. When an incident occurs, the location can be plotted on the map and concentric buffers can be created to prioritize the response. Using XMap’s spatial querying tools, the policy holders that fall within each buffer zone can be selected and used to generate a priority list or even a new data layer. This layer can then be distributed to adjusters on the ground using XMap 5.0 Professional, an affordable GIS alternative. When used in conjunction with XMap’s renowned GPS navigation tools there is no better tool for insurance adjusters than a mobile GIS.
Built With:
XMap 5.0 GIS Enterprise
BaseMap:
XMap USA Street Level Data 2007
User Additions:
Openspace layers showing the location of the incident and the affected policy holders
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