The York Region, north of Toronto, has 1.1 million residents and over 20,000 new residents each year.
The project submitted to our team was a considerable challenge: to create a portal for transferring CAD plans to the nine municipalities in the region.
WHAT WE IMPLEMENTED
The process in place was cumbersome and didn’t add value. The following problems and irritants motivated the project’s launch:
- The designs came in a variety of formats and quality.
- Hard copies needed to be scanned.
- Digital plans had to be standardized.
- Planners could not access necessary data for documents and maps.
- Errors were introduced during manual steps.
Implementing this web portal aimed to solve multiple issues related to data consistency, access limitations, and execution time.
The project aimed to set up several processes:
- Automated digital submission to eliminate manual processing
- Basic validation of the data received
- Automatic conversion from CAD to GIS without any human intervention
- Automatic creation of statistical reports
- Creation of a PDF file of the submission
CHALLENGES
This project encompassed the implementation of a complete system, which required Consortech to take charge of many aspects: management, knowledge transfer, implementation, creation of optimized ETL processing, and compatibility with various interfaces.
The complex IT environment was also a challenge! Several FME Server services had to be configured to give administrators everything they needed to track their requests.
Finally, the project brought together several stakeholders with varying levels of knowledge. Consortech adapted its communications and work methods to rally all employees towards the common goal!
RESULTS
The goal of this project was to implement a solution to receive plans in digital format. The solution had to be scalable to accept several types of plans (infrastructure, roads, planning, etc.).
In less than six months, our team consulted the different stakeholders to develop a shared project vision. We designed the solution’s architecture, implemented FME (Desktop and Server), and developed the web interface.
With the portal, the client benefits from their employees needing to invest less effort, consistent data, integrated systems, the ability to share data, and a shorter response time for residents. Our agile consulting approach has led to the development of a flexible and scalable solution that enables the client to work actively with FME.