Automation involves meticulously documenting all the logic, choices, and decisions made in a product’s development. By creating ready-made or custom scripts and tools, automation allows programmes to handle processes independently, requiring minimal human oversight. This approach significantly boosts productivity and enhances a team’s flexibility and capacity. One of the key benefits of automation is its ability to deliver consistent outputs, eliminating human error and ensuring uniform results every time. In multidisciplinary projects with multiple teams, this level of efficiency is crucial for maintaining smooth workflows and achieving high-quality results. Advanced automation can reduce repeatable analysis or mapping processes from days to hours or less, saving time and money, while minimizing risk by delivering a consistent product every time.
Integration, on the other hand, focuses on combining various data sources, tools and technologies to create a cohesive and comprehensive framework for analysis. Using FME, we can transform and convert data into various formats, consolidate the data where needed into combined datasets, which facilitate effective analysis and visualization, leading to informed decision making. Benefits of data integration include streamlining of information to enable systems to work better together, reduced errors and time savings. We strongly encourage putting time into integration workflows were possible.
Automating Map ProductionMinistry for the Environment & Mountains to Sea Conservation Trust
Creating a series of maps for river catchments across New Zealand can involve numerous repetitive and manual tasks, which has the potential to introduce error at every step. Automation is essential to minimize manual intervention, while ensuring robust and uniform results each time. Given the uniqueness of each river catchment, our automation strategy leverages both custom geoprocessing scripts and standard tools to streamline the mapping process. This refinement not only enhances our productivity significantly, but also ensures that the outputs maintain a high level of trustworthiness, even with the increased frequency of production.
Integrating Regional Council Data into Mapping & Analysis ProcessesRegional Councils
Data from Regional Councils comes in various formats, but to enable analysis and reporting between or even across regions, the data needs to be in a consistent format. To achieve this, we use FME to create a process to bring in the data and format it to a common schema. When we get new data from a Regional Council, we can quickly match the data to this schema using the already established FME process and make it available to mapping processes that are already set-up for the common schema. This approach means our data processing is efficient, and we can analyse or report on the data with a high level of confidence in its completeness and data currency.
