County of Union, NJ Saves Thousands with Label-EZ

Plainsboro, New Jersey - May 2, 2003

The County of Union, NJ has implemented a GIS oriented map production system based around MapText, Inc.’s Label-EZ™ and Label-Edit™ software. Using the high-quality automated text placement capabilities of Label-EZ, the county was able to complete the road map project in-house for the first time, saving thousands of dollars that it used to spend by purchasing the county road map from private mapping organizations. The road map project involved preparing a central database using the feature data from various townships, forming a base map layer, labeling of map features using Label-EZ and preparing the map for publishing. The entire project was completed in a time span of less than 3 months.

The county previously incurred huge costs (the road map project alone previously cost over $100,000) for maintaining all of the maps on an annual basis as it used to contract out all its mapping projects. Pressured by increasing costs, budget cuts and increasing demands from state’s homeland security department, the county decided to implement its own map production system. After exploring various options for text placement, the county selected MapText’s products for their ability to generate high-quality output in a matter of minutes, their flexibility to handle different map types, and their ease of use.

With the new map production system, the County of Union is experiencing improved quality text placement in a significantly shorter time span. The labeling results from Label-EZ are stored in the central database and can be easily accessed by other departments. Moreover, the update process for the road map project is also significantly shortened as Label-EZ will retain all the map finishing performed when placing text for updated features. “Label-EZ has proved to be an invaluable tool as we would not have been able to complete the road map project without it in the short time span and limited funds. In over 15 years of my experience in GIS industry, I have never encountered such high-quality support for any product. The MapText support team provided excellent training for efficiently using the software and was always reachable for resolving all issues (including problems with our data) and getting the results ready in the shortest time span.” said Matt Mathan, GIS Bureau Chief.