Meet Vasily.

Vasily is an industrial site inspector responsible for supporting fair industrial assessment in Alberta. In turn, his work helps fund key government programs.

That’s because in this western Canadian province – known for its prairie skies, productive energy industry and can-do attitude – sizeable tax revenues are generated from industrial sites. 

Vasily and his team at Alberta Municipal Affairs have a passion for making sure those revenues are collected fairly - based on accurate valuations of industrial properties and facilities.

With over 70,000 sites in the province, the team has a difficult job. The size of the province – it’s the same size as Texas! – the sheer number of sites and the mountain of data available creates operational challenges for those maintaining fair and accurate assessment information.

The team knows that data… is just data. Gaining insights from raw data is impossible. This is where SAS and its 40 year partnership with the Government of Alberta comes in. By working together -- and leveraging SAS Visual Analytics -- data can be brought to life. 

In 2019 Municipal Affairs business and technical teams worked with SAS to design and build a new application in Visual Analytics to solve the data organization challenges.

The result was iCamp, a custom application that uses Visual Analytics for data standardization, organize, presentation and much more.

iCamp has a rich dashboard that shows key assessment metrics in text, table and chart form. The mapping object provides a customizable view of where industrial sites are located, making it easy to see which are remote and to plan logistics to carry out inspections. Comparisons between previous years or between municipalities are just a click away.  These features make iCamp an excellent tool for analysis and for delivering engaging interactive presentations.

With information so well presented in SAS Visual Analytics, true insights into Municipal Affairs’ business are possible.

This is because the iCamp solution informs decision makers as to what the information means.

• Which sites can be efficiently inspected based on how remote they are?
• What additional tax revenues are possible in this municipality, or what sites have reduced assessment values?
• How many inspections do we need to do?
• What is the improved return on investment if we decide to inspect these four remote sites, versus assessing seven others that are nearby and easier to access?

In the past two years, these predictive features of SAS Visual Analytics and iCamp have already saved Municipal Affairs significant inspection costs, increased assessment accuracy and improved job satisfaction for assessors.

By leveraging the strong business acumen of Municipal Affairs management and analysts, and combining it with SAS Visual Analytics platform, the team can discover and share powerful insights that improve services to Alberta industry and citizens.