Irvine’s Thomas Bros. Profits From Redirection as High-Tech Data Provider
Employees call it the “war room,” a high-tech lair that looks like a miniature NASA control center. It’s where Southern California Edison dispatchers map power outages on giant computer screens.
But beneath those flashing lights and colored images of transformers, circuits and substations lies a rendering of Southern California’s landscape that millions of motorists would find very familiar. They may even have a low-tech version--known as a Thomas Guide--tucked under the seats of their cars.
Thomas Bros. has been making maps since 1915, and for the first 75 years very little changed. But satellites, computers and an array of emerging technologies have ushered in a new era in map-making, and the small Irvine-based company now finds itself at the precipice of an expansive but confusing frontier.
The thick, detailed guidebooks still account for 85% of the company’s $20 million in annual sales. But just three years ago, that number was 100%.
Since then, the company has introduced a bundle of new technology-driven products, ranging from maps that can be viewed on computers to allowing Edison and others to license the company’s growing digital database. A few years from now, these products and others could account for half the company’s revenue, said Glen Jansma, vice president of business development.
“We’re not inventing computers or computer technology,” Jansma said. “We’re just using it.”
Indeed, the company’s quiet Irvine offices these days look more like a software house than a map-making enterprise. Cubicles and computers have taken the place of pens and drafting tables, and most employees are more comfortable wielding a mouse than a ruler.
The Thomas Bros. transformation began about eight years ago, when Warren Wilson, an attorney for the Thomas family who has owned most of the company since 1955, ordered the sleepy enterprise to go high-tech.
The aim was to find a more efficient and accurate way to produce the company’s well-known guidebooks, but Wilson and others also knew that transferring Thomas Bros. maps from pen-and-ink drawings to digitally stored data could lead to dozens of new ways to use the same old information.
The war room at Southern California Edison offers a glimpse of just one of those new applications. Others include a system that allows customers to place orders for custom-made wall maps over the Internet, and a computer edition of the Thomas Guide that sells for $400 and allows customers to locate addresses, zero in on tiny neighborhoods or plug in the locations of their company’s customers.
Down the road, Thomas Bros. also has its eyes on what could be a huge market for in-vehicle navigation systems--dashboard displays that use global positioning satellites to show motorists where they are and how to get to their destinations. Thomas Bros. won’t make the displays, but will sell the CD-ROM-based map data that the devices play.
“When they want data to go into cars, we think we’re going to be there,” Jansma said.
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Thomas Bros. is not alone in rushing into the market for digital map data. In fact, while Thomas Bros. is scurrying to complete its digital database for California--the company’s traditional stronghold--a couple of Bay Area companies are busy erecting databases for the entire United States.
One of those companies, Menlo Park-based Etak Inc., already has licensing contracts with big phone companies, including Nynex and Sprint, as well as regional power and shipping companies.
Etak, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., also has its sights set on the in-vehicle navigation market. Howard Koch, the company’s head of marketing, says Etak’s data is already included in navigation devices built by Sony, and that the company hopes its efforts to build a nationwide database will give it an edge over regional players such as Thomas Bros.
“Companies like Sony want to cover the entire U.S.,” Koch said. “They don’t want to just cover California.”
But Thomas Bros. executives say their prominent brand name will help them keep control of the California market, and that the company is poised to expand across the United States when the market ripens.
In fact, six months ago Thomas Bros. took its first step outside its cozy West Coast territory when it won a $2-million contract to develop a digital database of Washington, D.C. and neighboring counties in Maryland for the region’s real estate association.
“The biggest question in my mind is how fast the consumer demand for digital map products is going to grow,” Jansma said. “We’re not going to lead the market with investments upfront, but we’re poised to move quickly.”
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To build its digital databases, Thomas Bros. had to start almost from scratch, even in California. Its long-standing maps, based on information provided by county governments and other second-hand sources, weren’t accurate enough for a world in which car navigation devices and other tracking systems demand accuracy to within 10 feet.
So the company turned to a complex process that involves taking overlapping aerial photos of each 260-acre section in a mapping area. Technicians then use stereoscopic equipment to view the sections in 3-D, and digitally plot the roads and other landmarks in a database according to their precise geographic positions.
Once the database is created, technicians flesh it out with street names, color-coded parks and other eye-friendly touches familiar to the generations of motorists who have used Thomas Guides.
The process bears little resemblance to the pen-and-ink craft that carried the company through seven decades.
Tom Lennon, now a general manager, started as a cartographer using a crow quill pen and ink dropper in 1956. The company, which now employs 240, had just a handful of workers then, and his office was a converted bathroom in a cramped house the company rented in Glendale.
When the company updated its extensive street indexes, Lennon said, the street names would be written on perforated strips of paper which workers would tear apart, place on the floor and alphabetize. Now it’s simply a matter of typing new listings into a computer.
Drawing the maps was also a painstaking process, he said. Artists were trained to duplicate their supervisors’ handwriting so street names would look the same. Technology has made the process much easier, Lennon said, but it has also created new headaches.
“Back then, we just made it look right,” Lennon said. “Now we live in constant fear that someone can go to a corner somewhere and stand there with a satellite device and say, ‘Nope, this isn’t where Thomas Bros. said it would be.’ ”
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That high degree of accuracy, however, is exactly what has helped the company land licensing contracts with numerous companies and agencies, including Pacific Bell, Los Angeles County, the Orange County Transportation Authority and the California Highway Patrol.
Most of these clients have signed multiyear contracts, and pay anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000 per year for access to the Thomas Bros. database.
Southern California Edison licensed the database a little over a year ago, as the giant utility launched a major overhaul of its “outage management system.”
The Thomas Bros. database is made up not just of fancy computer graphics, but layers of information linked to every piece of the map. For every block-long stretch of street, cul-de-sac or highway there are accompanying address fields, ZIP Codes and census tracts.
Clients can add their own information, just as Edison overlaid its network of power lines and equipment on the Thomas Bros. data. That enabled Edison crews to spot geographic patterns to power outages, and direct workers to trouble spots faster.
The system proved its worth when pounding winds and rain set the stage for a unique experiment on the evening of Jan. 9, 1995. The storm knocked out power to the same number of customers--28,000--in two of Southern California Edison’s most populous zones, but the utility’s response was decidedly lopsided.
Customers in the Santa Ana zone, where the new system was in place, got their power back by 7 a.m. the next day, 41 hours earlier than their counterparts in the Dominguez Hills zone. And Santa Ana used half as many dispatch workers, while spending $200,000 less.
Since then, “we’ve had utilities from all over the world coming here to see how we do our business,” said Ron Ferree, superintendent of the Santa Ana center. Ferree added that the system is now in place across Edison’s service area.
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Beyond the shifting technologies of map-making, Thomas Bros. also appears headed for more fundamental changes. The business has been independently owned since it was founded in Oakland 81 years ago by George Coupland Thomas. But Wilson, who bought the company from Thomas’ widow in 1955, said he hopes to sell Thomas Bros. stock to the public “within five years.”
He has been preparing for the move by doling out $20,000 chunks of stock--the most allowable without incurring heavy federal gift taxes--to his five children annually in recent years. Two sons-in-law, including Jansma, work for the company.
Still, there is one way that Thomas Bros. will not change, he said. Even as the company rolls out dozens of new high-tech products, it remains committed to the trusty Thomas Guide.
“That’s always been the foundation of this company,” Wilson said, “and it still is.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Showing the Way
Irvine-based Thomas Bros. Maps has added a high-tech element to its product line. In addition to books and wall maps, it now offers map data in digital and CD-ROM formats. How Thomas Bros. computerized data is used:
California Highway Patrol
Customized Thomas Bros. computerized map data is used in all dispatch centers with the following information added:
* All freeway call box locations
* Ambulance and tow truck zones
* Police jurisdiction boundaries
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Southern California Edison
Entire electrical infrastructure added to help locate:
* Substations
* Transformers
* Circuitry
* Power outages
* Customer homes and businesses
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Pacific Bell
Fiber optic cable installation
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Caltrans
Monitoring traffic flow and accidents
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San Fernando Valley Board of Realtors
Combines Thomas Bros. data with TRW REDI Property Data’s home sales information to monitor sales trends
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Governor’s office of emergency services
* Earthquake analysis
* Dispatched trucks to haul rubble after San Fernando Valley earthquake
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Future applications
* Combining Thomas Bros. data with various sources of computerized traffic information for traffic updates via home computer
* Helping vehicle dispatch operations devise routes, dispatch vehicles and track them electronically; dispatcher could route vehicles away from traffic jams with computerized traffic data
Source: Thomas Bros. Maps; Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times
