CONNECT. TRANSFORM. AUTOMATE.

The Power of One

Renato Salvaleon GISP, CSMSr. GIS StaffLand DepartmentGeorgia 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, environmentalists, 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

QA

Case 3a – Workflow Management FME enters into picture

QA

Remove the GIS Analyst from the submittal process

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