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Unveiling the Winners of the 2022 Awards of FME Excellence

June 17, 2022Unveiling the Winners of the 2022 Awards of FME Excellence

The winners of the 2022 Awards of FME Excellence were announced on June 7, at a very special edition of the FME World Tour. Like the year before it, the 2022 edition was a resounding success, with over twenty project submissions. FME users greatly impressed us with their creativity and the usefulness of their solutions in boosting their organization’s geospatial performance.

Once again faced with some incredibly tough decisions, our jury members had no choice but to give out a few special mentions to honour projects that brought something new and fresh to the table. Even with relatively clear selection criteria from the start, the diversity and quality of the submissions made judging particularly challenging, and many a heated debate was had before we were able to arrive at a list of winners.
 
Without further ado, here are this year’s award recipients:
 
 

Best Small Efficiency-Boosting Project

Prize awarded to the Town of Mono, Ontario

Automating parcel data updates into ArcGIS Online

Zdravko Jakop presented this project, which impressed the jury with its resourceful and surprisingly simple solution using only desktop and SaaS technologies—a smart, realistic approach considering the tools available to many small to medium municipal governments. This project also stood out in adding a mapping component to a kind of software used by all municipalities: real property and property tax management software.

On a more technical note, we loved how Zdravko managed to automate the syncing of ArcGIS parcel layers with the property information on Keystone Complete, and then make the results available on cloud-based application ArcGIS Online. Just like that, he saved the City between 30 and 45 minutes of menial work a week, and his colleagues now have easy access to updated and validated data in just a few clicks.
 
 

Honourable mention to the City of Rimouski, Quebec

Winter night parking management

Daniel Alvarez used FME to integrate the City’s multiple systems into the GIS database in order to publish an interactive map that can be used by residents and other stakeholders to view information about zoning and land use. The jury was impressed by the smart ways in which the project used FME, but especially by how much ROI the project got on such little technical effort. Another point of interest was how much the GIS community could learn from the project, especially in terms of centralizing information to make municipal governments more transparent.

 

Best Automation Project

Prize awarded to Public Services and Procurement Canada

Automating ticket management for national underground infrastructure

For this project, Philippe Palmer and Jean-François Leboeuf fully automated a critical process in protecting underground infrastructure. What convinced the jury was the range of technologies used (FME, FME Server, ArcGIS, Gallery App), how the solution can adapt to a range of input formats (each province’s One Call service uses its own format), and how it does all that with an impressive ROI: about 150 hours of work went into generating recurring gains of at least 400 hours a year.

In addition to making impressive time gains by eliminating manual tasks, the project minimizes the risk of error and significantly increases data accuracy. Not only that, but files from repositories on the FTP site are integrated in real time, 24/7. The information is centralized in a database that can be easily accessed at all times, both by operators and by decision makers. Decision makers also have access to detailed reports including historical data.
 
 

Honourable mention to the City of Riviere-du-Loup, Quebec

Automating intervention plan management

This project, submitted by Jérôme Guimont, tackles an issue all Quebec municipalities know well: creating intervention plans. Intervention plans are a key part of prioritizing work to be done on a city’s strategic assets, such as the water system, sewer system and roads. The Riviére-du-Loup government wanted to redesign and optimize its process, and that is where FME came in.

The jury was impressed by the scope of the automation project, which makes it possible to sidestep a long, labour-intensive manual process that previously took an entire week of work. Now, all the necessary integrations and complex underlying calculations are done with three clicks and two minutes of processing. Jury members also appreciated how FME workspaces can detect data entry omissions and errors—truly virtually foolproof!
 
 
 

Best Outside the Box Project

Prize awarded to the City of Longueuil, Quebec

Monitoring street lighting conversion to LED

Submitted by François Filion-Rouillier, this outside-the-box project made a great impression on the members of the jury—some even remarked they wouldn’t have thought of the idea themselves! We like that, besides being markedly original, the project integrates a great variety of technologies and that the automation developed for processing unique QR codes adds to the GIS by integrating the information in the Excel file specific to each street light. In addition, this new technique can be reused in future projects in similar contexts, including for processing data flows from the Internet of Things (IoT).

There’s a lot in this project to be impressed with, but the jury also noted that the use of well-integrated mobile technologies allows the City to monitor work progress in near real time and makes it unnecessary to send a supervisor out into the field. Given the current labour shortage, we hope this project will inspire many of our community members!
 
 

Honourable mention to the City of Montreal, Quebec

Replacement of a zoning mapping application with FME

This project, submitted by Thierry Belou, truly goes off the beaten path by using FME as a permanent component in a new mapping application to replace a discontinued commercial solution (Intergraph MGE). This is a major project, in that it generates the maps that are used for granting permits worth several million dollars a year. The jury liked how the solution was entirely developed with FME Desktop, which the City already used, saving the municipality from having to purchase a new, expensive commercial solution.

 
Another asset of the project is how it includes data processing and validation elements, and how it makes it possible to edit discrepancies. It also allowed the City to keep the mapping standards it knew and appreciated from the old system. The work for creating workspaces was estimated at four months, for an anticipated 30%–35% gain in productivity over the old system, depending on the borough.

Consortech would like to congratulate all recipients and thank all the organizations that submitted their projects this year. The sheer diversity of the submissions we received is testament to how, especially coupled with ArcGIS, the sky truly is the limit for what FME can do.

We wholeheartedly hope these projects will inspire your organization to improve its geospatial performance, either by making low-value-added tasks more efficient or by providing your customers and local residents with exciting new possibilities.

 

WATCH THE WINNING PRESENTATIONS