Doubling productivity with a web-based FME Solution

Meeting growing energy demands

Jemena owns and operates a diverse array of energy assets across Australia. With over $12.4 billion in major utility infrastructure, Jemena provides essential services to millions of households and businesses. 

Jemena’s network distributes electricity to more than 370,000 customer sites through approximately 6800 km of distribution systems in greater Melbourne. This area includes major industrial zones, residential growth regions and established suburbs, and Melbourne International Airport. This region is one of Australia’s fastest-growing populations – a major contributor to Melbourne surpassing Sydney as the nation’s most populous city. 

To address the increasing demand for electricity, Jemena contracts infrastructure construction companies to develop new assets. With underground networks now the standard, there is a greater reliance on GIS systems to accurately model critical, unseen assets. 

Adapting to rising data processing demands

Jemena relies on its GE Smallworld GIS system to model its electricity assets and plan its work programs. Contractors provide data about new assets through “as-built” AutoCAD drawings. Despite Jemena’s development of an AutoCAD template to streamline importing drawings into the GIS, variations in data submission from different contractors are common. To ensure data integrity, CAD and GIS specialists validate and standardize the as-built drawings to match the  template before uploading.

The volume of work has grown exponentially over the last 3-5 years, with an annual increase of about 20-25%. “We had to be more efficient in what we were doing. The volume was too great and we were starting to generate a backlog,” according to Brett Wilson, GIS Electricity Team Leader.

While Jemena met statutory obligations, including uploading CAD drawings to their Before You Dig service, the GIS team needed to meet internal key performance indicators, which emphasize the critical need for up-to-date information.

Accelerating data processing leads to double the productivity

Upon discovering FME’s ability to transform and upload CAD data into GIS systems from another major utility company, Jemena partnered with Safe Software partner 1Spatial, who proposed a proof-of-concept solution.

The solution was highly successful, implementing most of the necessary transformations at three times the speed of manual processing. A GIS team member could use FME to process a sample drawing in under an hour, compared to over three hours manually. 

In the second stage of the project, 1Spatial deployed an FME Flow solution, implementing a full set of business logic to validate and transform a wide range of input data. The GIS team now submits AutoCAD drawings via a secure web page, swiftly integrating the data into the GIS. 

The end result is a web-based solution that does not require specialist skills, enabling team members to validate, transform, and upload about three as-built drawings per day into the GIS system – doubling their productivity.