The Town of Mono, a rural community in South Central Ontario, Canada, has a population of less than 10,000 spread over an area of 277 km2. Like all other municipalities, it has the responsibility of maintaining its infrastructure to ensure the safety of its residents. However, given its size, it has limited resources with just one GIS/IT technician who needs to achieve more with less. In order to support him better, the Town invested in the FME technology to automate manual tasks related to managing road faults and repairs (potholes, traffic signals, etc.).
THE CHALLENGE
Yet, the GIS/IT specialist’s workload increased even more as the Town teamed up with Go-Evo, a subcontractor, to assess the night visibility of road signals and their general condition. As a result, in addition to his regular work, he had to start downloading the data collected by Go-Evo’s application and entering it in ArcGIS Online (AGOL), the mapping application used by public works employees. This whole manual process required long and tedious efforts that cost him more than an hour a day. In order to exploit the full potential of its FME technology and to automate repetitive manual processes that added little value, the Town looked for a partner with the right expertise. On the recommendation of a neighboring city, Consortech was approached.
HOW WE HELPED
Being well-versed in such challenges, our experts first studied the Town’s current processes to determine the best approach to take. Consequently, they decided to train the GIS/IT technician in the FME technology so that he could use it easily and effectively. Since this technology offers many possibilities for automation, we provided additional coaching to get him to create an FME Workspace that would directly process the data collected (field and structure management) by Go-Evo, through a connection to their API (Application Program Interface), and feed them into AGOL.
As easy as it may look, the project did have a few challenges, one of them being the complexity of the API. A short working session with Go-Evo helped us better understand the API’s particularities and adapt the FME Workspace accordingly.
THE VALUE WE PROVIDED
Our coaching approach made it possible to completely automate the tasks that the technician had to undertake manually earlier. The new process is automatically activated every day. As a bonus, an integrated monitoring tool checks that it is working well and prevent possible errors. In short, the system functions like a well-oiled machine resulting in a happy situation for all!
The Town’s GIS specialist is the happiest as he not only gets to save FIVE hours per week but also enjoys great peace of mind knowing that he will be notified if a problem occurs during data processing. Thanks to his coaching with Consortech, he managed to gain expertise in the FME technology which now allows him to focus on more important tasks such as improving other public works processes.
Working with Consortech was a great experience! I had a manual process that was not an ideal use of time and I thought I would be able to leverage FME for automation. After some coaching sessions with Consortech, we’ve completed the project quickly and to my expectations. I can now use the saved-up time to improve other methods and manual tasks at the town. I can also say that the more I learn FME, the more I realise that it is like a new colleague that takes on the less interesting tasks without taking a break!
Think you spend too much time manually integrating data on your infrastructure?