The Power of a Single Transformer

CONNECT. TRANSFORM. AUTOMATE.
The Power of One
Renato Salvaleon GISP, CSM
Sr. GIS Staff
Land Department
Georgia Power Company

SCOPE
 Background
 Use Cases
 Data Mining
 Data Migration
 Workflow Solutions
 Contract Negotiation
 Conclusion

Company Background
 GPC is an operating company under Southern Company
 Land Department provides Land Engineering and Land
Management support for the company.
 Activities includes survey and mapping, locating and
acquiring properties, protecting our shoreline properties
and timber, recording properties in GIS and document
management system in support of
transmission, distribution and generation projects.
 200+ GIS users with varying degrees of skills. Includes
surveyors, researchers, mappers, engineers, environmentali
sts, foresters, shoreline specialists, archaeologist, project
coordinators.

Personal Background
 Senior GIS Analyst, 11 years with SCS/GPC
working in Transmission, IT and Land.
 14 years in the active military service, last two
years spent putting up & managing a GIS system.
 CSM and GISP, taking a surveying certification at
SPSU. GIS certificate and MSIS at KSU.
 Introduced to FME in 2006
 Love-Hate Relationship with FME until 2009

Case 1 – Data Mining NGS
Control Points FTP to SDE
NOAA
NGS
Survey
data
explorer
Our Own GIS Viewer, with Onbase

FTP, Zipped shapefile to SDE…

…from SDE to web service.
DO NOT DROP THE SDE Feature
Class in the TRANSLATION!

Case 2- Data Migration –
Geolocate documents
 From Oracle non-spatial tables to Oracle SDE
non-spatial tables

 Use existing GIS location
datasets to locate each
record of the three
document tables
 Use
lat/long, addresses, city,
county, or state as
locators for each record
Geocode – using ArcCatalog
and any existing GIS data

Case 3a – Workflow
Management
Streamlining a manual workflow to a more automated workflow
Vendor
Submittal
•Submits field
collected data in GIS
personal geodatabase
format
Environmental
Specialist
•Uses ArcMap
•QCs the data
•Weeds out unwanted
data using Object IDs of
each feature class
•Loads data in to SDE
GIS Analyst
•Converts
data from
CAD to GIS
from SDE
Mapper
• Adds Env
data to
the plan
QA

Case 3a – Workflow
Management
FME enters into picture
Vendor
Submittal
•Submits field
collected data in GIS
personal geodatabase
format
Environmental
Specialist
•QCs the data
•Weeds out unwanted
data using Object IDs of
each feature class
•Loads data in to SDE
using FME.
GIS Analyst
•Converts
data from
CAD to GIS
from SDE
using FME
Mapper
• Adds Env
data to
the plan
QA

Remove the GIS Analyst from
the submittal process
Vendor
Submittal
•Submits field collected data
in GIS personal geodatabase
format
Environmental
Specialist
•QCs the data
•Weeds out unwanted data using
Object IDs of each feature class
•Runs one FME workbench
Mapper
•Adds Env
data to
the plan
GIS
Analyst
Supports the
workbench

Case 3a Today – one
workbench

New workbench request – pre-planning
data export on a line buffer
Learn published parameters

Case 3b – Data Conversion to
Workflow Management solution
 CAD to GIS from a data conversion task to a
simple workflow solution
 Tried everything – Feature service using ArcGIS
for AutoCAD, CAD conversion in
ArcMap, Python, Exporting CAD objects to SHP or
SDE using FDO.
 QA follows any conversion option
 ESRI and AUTODESK always outdoing each other
 FME to the rescue

 Manager wants the mappers to do it during
the project and not at the end
 Mappers want to use an Easy button
 Stay within the context of AutoCAD Civil3D
 GIS terms like SDE connection strings, versions, reconcile
and post, gives CAD mappers the shiver.
In Civil3D context, Parcel workflow includes QC, a SRS is set on the
dwg, polylines are converted to closed polygons, feature attributes in
CAD (parcel name and number) are included in the export.

Case 3b – SDF reader &
Autodesk Civil3D

Case 4 – Contract Negotiation
 Most unlikely use of a single transformer to save
$300K
 Need to acquire parcels for the state
 Annual budget of $42,000 – capital and O/M
dollars.
 Very few providers of standard parcel data
 Originally quoted $600K for a 3-year contract

Project’s parcel need turned into a Proof
of Concept for bulk purchase
 7,000+ acre land acquisition project in a single county
badly needed parcel data
 Regular data providers do not have the data.
 National provider have data in text format and it would take
a month to get it out of their production queue.
 After research and getting with Safe support, a single
transformer in FME came in handy for converting text data
in WKT (well-known text) format to GIS.

GeometryReplacer
Transformer & the CSV Reader
Text file schema has 2 columns - FIPS
and WKT - and separated by a ;.
…and in
addition
KML, GML,
Geohash

Case 4 - Negotiations
 The FME translation is a similar process that the vendor uses. Our
vendor does not do the translation from text to GIS, they pay
their sister company to do it for them.
 I offered our annual budget for a 42K/year, 3-year contract.
 Land/vendor agreed to work a contract that would deliver text
data for all available counties in Georgia.
 A sister company of the vendor offered another GPC business unit
a similar deal delivering geometry with less attributes for a lot
more.
 Negotiations ensued and because Land had a process in place to
convert data from text to GIS, the cost of that process was
removed from the final offer.
 We ended up getting both boundaries and attribute from the
vendor

Case 4 - Today
 Contract was closed with a $105K/year for 3
years
 We receive 4M records of parcels (polygons and
points) for almost all counties in GA once a year
and a monthly update of tax data.
 We still use FME to load the data into SDE and
run updates. Imagine doing this task using ESRI
tools in three SDEs, 300+ feature classes, and
half a dozen multiple web mapping services.

Tips for learning FME
 1st programming lesson I learned - steal code or in
FME’s case, workbench. Look at their samples.
 Get trained, whenever available. Go attend FME’s
webinars and study their demos
 Seek help from Safe’s Support.
 Be patient and remove the context of the tool you
use everyday out of the equation.
 Share it with your team mates.
 Learn that one thing to achieve the business goal.

Looking Ahead!
 Deploy 2014 so we could start using the Email
notifier in our workflow translations.
 Buying FME Server
 Data synchronization system for our enterprise tools
 Make it easier for our current users to run their
translations
 Pushing out often used translations

Thank You!
 Questions?
 For more information:
 Renato Salvaleon – rsalvale@southernco.com
 Georgia Power Company
 Land Department

The Power of a Single Transformer

More Related Content

Similar to The Power of a Single Transformer (20)

More from Safe Software (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

The Power of a Single Transformer