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CASE STUDY

State Land and Building System (SLABS)
State of Louisiana

GCR Inc. partnered with the Office of Information Services (OIS) to provide a technical rewrite of the State Land and Building System. The work began in July 2004, and was completed on-site in 2006. 

SLABS, as the system is known by its users, is the State's repository of information on the properties and buildings in which the State has an active interest as well as the conveyance documents associated with these holdings. SLABS, through its subsystems REELS and STAMPS, also keeps track of the State's real estate leases and insurance on movable property (respectively).

slabs screen

The origins of SLABS date back to 1986, when a pilot program to determine the validity of state land and building records was executed in Terrebonne Parish. This audit, which utilized information provided by the State Land Office and the Office of Risk Management, uncovered a discrepancy between official records and actual holdings.  After a five-year field effort to capture a more complete picture of the State's assets, the agencies involved needed a way to keep track of this information and the information that would be gathered in the future. Hard copy files were created and the information was stored on the State's mainframe computer.

Since several agencies have an interest in this information, a uniform method of creating, accessing and editing the data is needed. The initial development of the mainframe system began in 1990 in collaboration with GCR. SLABS has grown beyond its original mission of simply inventorying state lands and buildings. It has also outgrown its original programming language. SLABS was created in VisualAge Generator, an application that is currently nonstandard in OIS.  Today, GCR is back on the scene to work with OIS to produce a system that is not only user-friendly and maintains the same features but also can be more easily maintained by the OIS staff. The OIS staff will benefit from the knowledge transfer during the construction without being burdened with the responsibility of a complete in-house rebuild.