City of Airdrie consolidates infrastructure data with a CAD to GIS migration

Accommodating a unique migration process

The City of Airdrie, near Calgary, is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in Alberta, with an annual growth of almost 7.5% over the past five years. Keeping pace with rapid expansion means the city’s geomatics team depends on accurate, up-to-date infrastructure data at all times.

For years, that data lived in two separate places. The geomatics department maintained a GIS database alongside a CAD master plan — two parallel systems that were supposed to reflect the same infrastructure reality. In practice, running them side-by-side led to inevitable duplication. Whenever infrastructure information needed updating, the team had to manage changes across both platforms, increasing the risk of inconsistencies and conflicting records.

The city recognized that a single source of truth was no longer a nice-to-have — it was a necessity.

Building FME workspaces for a complex, one-of-a-kind migration

Safe Software partner, Consortech, started with a thorough data inventory to understand exactly what the migration would involve. What they found quickly ruled out a generic approach: the structure and content of Airdrie’s CAD input files were too specific to automate with a single, reusable script. The team needed to examine the data in detail, identifying every place where automation was viable and designing custom FME workspaces around Airdrie’s unique data model.

The project moved through several deliberate phases. A pilot project was carried out first to validate the proposed methodology and confirm that a single-phase migration was feasible. From there, Consortech developed the FME workspaces required to convert the CAD data into the city’s new GIS format — carefully reworking each workspace to meet the specific demands of the migration without starting from scratch at every turn.

To round out the engagement, Consortech delivered detailed reporting on the migration’s success rate and conducted hands-on training sessions with the geomatics team, equipping them with the skills to independently manage and maintain the new GIS data model.

A single, reliable dataset for a growing city

With the migration complete, the City of Airdrie’s geomatics department now works from a single, centralized infrastructure dataset. The need to manually perform import and assignment tasks across two platforms is gone — and with it, the risk of duplicate or conflicting records.

The shift to GIS has also brought meaningful improvements to execution speed, giving Airdrie’s team a more efficient foundation to keep up with the city’s ongoing growth. Centralized, up-to-date data is now the baseline, not the goal.