Wellington City Council & Locus boost efficiency by automating key processes

A data synchronization challenge

Wellington City Council (WCC) is a territorial authority governing New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington. The Council is responsible for a range of services to support the environmental, social, cultural and economic wellbeing of the wider community. This includes the administration of transport infrastructure, including roads, bridges and associated assets.

There are approximately 700km of road under WCC’s management control. WCC uses RAMM (Road Asset Maintenance and Management) as the master Asset Management System for assets associated with the roading network. These include signs, street lighting, traffic systems, bridges, parking, footpaths, and cycleways. These roading assets also need to be stored in WCC’s Esri GIS system. Both systems must remain up-to-date and synchronized. The standard tools in RAMM support the addition, amendment, and deletion of assets. Keeping GIS aligned with RAMM was previously a manual process with a duplication of effort and risk of data entry errors.

An automated solution

Determined to find a smarter and more efficient means to keep the systems in-check as well as reduce the possibility of human error, Wellington City Council Infrastructure Data Analyst Kirsten Brown devised an FME powered solution to harmonize the data between systems.

Developing an automation workflow in FME, a connection between the RAMM API and the WCC GIS system was established and what had been an ad-hoc hands-on data processing task (sometimes not done due to time pressure) became a hands-off weekly scheduled automation.