March 23, 2010 -- Saudi Post Corporation has won the "GIS Technology Innovation Award" for the year 2009, from Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), the global leader in the field of Geographic Information Systems.

This winning of Saudi Post became an addition to the achievements of Saudi Post which gained many international achievements in the field of Information Technology and Geographic Information Systems. Saudi Post is awarded for the pioneer project of innovating a new Postal Addressing System, which is one of the most accurate systems in the world in the field of locating an address, which has resulted in the identification of more than two million postal addresses of the residential and commercial locations in the Kingdom with the accuracy up to one meter.

This Postal Addressing Project drew the attention of international institutions and organizations, making many of them to study and learn the details by means of a number of international experts and specialists of geographic systems and tested the quality standards for all applications and systems used by the Saudi Post in this Project.

The experts also pointed out that the systems and software used in Saudi Post to build this Postal Addressing are the latest systems existing in the world of modern techniques. The policies and mechanisms that are used by Saudi Post is the innovation and excellence at the international level in the field of Postal Addressing that cannot be built without using the latest technologies and programs of Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Mr. Jack Dangermond, the President of Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) of United States said "the award given to the Saudi Post based on nominations by others institutions, and according to the vision and key objectives to achieve the result in the field of Geographic Information Systems, and then comes the role of implementation of the project on the real world and praised the Postal Addressing project with great efforts, as well as on the implementation of the infrastructure of the Postal Addressing."

From his end, Eng. Ali H. Bakheet, GIS Director in Saudi Post, said that the award is the result of the efforts that has been done in the Postal Addressing Project within the Kingdom, which allowed the infrastructure to create an immense and accurate Geographic Information Database at the level of the Kingdom.

And Bakheet who was speaking following the receipt of the award, the US Research Institute selected Saudi Post, after the experts’ visit to Saudi Post where they made an assessment of many important points in the vision of the Corporation for the GIS and objectives, and the extent of its presence on the real world in addition to many other technical points regarding the design and characterization of the Geographical Database, the system and other related applications, such as the Saudi Locator, its main interface is designed with geographical information and postal addresses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is an addition to the other operational systems used by the Corporation relying on Geographic Information Systems such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System and Mail Dispatching and Management System (MDMS) and distributed to the Postal regions according to the geographical features distribution, which the Corporation has developed into a layer Zip Code as well as the sorting of these mails in the automated sorting machines. Likewise, Field Operation Systems for distribution such as Navigation system and also Vehicle tracking and monitoring system.

And Eng. Ali underlined that the organization of these systems and programs in addition to what the Corporation possesses the large databases of the Postal Addressing Project made a lot of public and private sectors of the international and local companies keen to sign agreements with Saudi Post in these fields.