Hydro-Québec is the second largest landlord in Quebec owning 62 hydroelectric plants and 671 dams; an electric transport network extending over 35,000 km; a power grid covering 112,000 km; and 6,000 properties, not including servitudes over 95,000 hectares.
The Property Management Department (PMD) of Hydro-Québec has, therefore, a huge responsibility for managing the information relating to all these properties and property rights for various purposes.
THE CHALLENGE
When the Quebec government launched a cadastral reform program, the PMD immediately saw it as an opportunity to create a centralized digital cadastre that would include all information relating to Hydro-Quebec’s properties and property rights.
Though this idea seemed interesting, it was very complex to implement as, first and foremost, it required the digitization of all the data appearing on approximately 3000 paper plans. In addition, this complex information as well as accompanying structures had to be saved in a central database equipped with spatial objects that help import the renovated cadastre, property rights polygons, property assessment centroids and the company’s infrastructure position.
As the PMD team was already using FME technology, they were looking for a partner who could assist them in leveraging this technology to realize their grand vision of creating a powerful centralized database. That’s how Consortech was brought on board.
HOW WE HELPED
We quickly jumped into action and helped the PMD team digitize their property drawings and property rights representations in AutoCAD. Simultaneously, we built a connection to their Oracle database in order to directly integrate all the information extracted from the drawings. This helped eliminate the delays between file entries and the subsequent graphical representations for end users.
Given the significant efforts required to manage the changes regularly made to the provincial cadastre, Hydro-Québec was the first organization to subscribe to a special service that offers two complete updates of the cadastre every year. Taking this into account, Consortech created an automatic loading and processing tool in the Oracle database to capture ongoing updates.
THE VALUE WE PROVIDED
The PMD’s initial goal was to leverage their FME platform to process and push data into a central database. But, while working on this ambitious goal, their GIS technicians realized that they could also extract data to combine and cross-check them with other sources. In this way, they could further consolidate their database with a wealth of external data from government departments, private companies and other organizations.
Today, the PMD is in a very good position not only to quickly deal with numerous requests related to real estate properties but also to produce maps, reports and files relating to a variety of subjects that are often complex: e.g. KPI and management dashboards; vegetation control; pest and insect location; borehole location; location of unused corridors; owners’ lists; fixed assets register showing acquisition value vs roll value; disputed real estate values; handling of KMZ files; etc.
It thus turns out that the PMD goes far beyond properties and property rights in providing the information requested by end users!
With FME and Consortech’s support, we have built a spatial database that allows our team to respond quickly to an ever-increasing number of varied requests for information – much to our pride and for the benefit of our entire organization.
Do you need a boost to centralize your geospatial data?