CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
How Hutt City Council Eliminated Environment Risk and Built a Foundation for FME Growth
By partnering with Locus to separate their development and production environments and upgrade their FME platform, Hutt City Council eliminated the operational risk of a shared environment, equipped their GIS team with the knowledge to maintain and optimise FME independently, and laid the foundation for continued growth across the organisation.
113,200 residents served
Lower Hutt, the second largest city in the Wellington region (Statistics NZ, June 2025
Environments separated
Development and production environments successfully divided, reducing risk across the growing FME user base
Full platform upgrade
Latest versions of FME Form, FME Flow, ESRI, and ArcGIS installed and validated
Organisation-wide scalability
FME extended beyond the GIS team to support the Applications team with a workflow API call solution
Extending our investment in FME, and the scalability it has brought to the organisation has positioned us well for future growth and we certainly appreciate the expertise and robust support that Locus have brought to the table.”
– John Floyd, LIS Manager, Hutt City Council
The Challenge
A Shared Environment Creating Risk as the FME User Base Grew
Hutt City Council is the governing body for Lower Hutt, the second largest city in the Wellington region of New Zealand, with a population of 113,200. The purpose of Hutt City is to provide leadership for the city through enabling democratic local decision making and to meet the current and future needs of communities for local infrastructure and public services.
To maintain organisation-wide data integrity, availability, and delivery, Hutt City required a robust IT development and production environment. Relatively new to FME, Hutt City Council had previously introduced FME Form and FME Flow along with two licences, but were looking to acquire two additional Desktop licences and a Server licence to facilitate the separation of their production environment from their development environment.
At Hutt City Council, the development and production environments were one-and-the-same. Separating them was much needed and driven also by growth in the FME user base, which can present additional risk where there is no division in working environments. With limited internal support, Hutt City sought assistance from Locus to help deliver a new production environment, ensuring it was configured and deployed correctly by validating connections, workspaces, and ensuring Active Directory was functioning as intended.
The Solution
Locus-Led Environment Separation, Upgrade, and On-Premise Knowledge Transfer
With the help of Darren Fergus, FME Certified Professional and Data Solutions expert, the GIS team at Hutt City accomplished the following:
- Current production server was backed-up and appointed the development server
- Installation of the latest version of FME Form and FME Flow, ESRI and ArcGIS
- On-premise knowledge-transfer, support and training of staff to troubleshoot, test and maintain best practice in the use of the FME platform
Specific tasks also included replicating one environment into the next to produce an exact copy and then optimising that, including automations, schedules and other bespoke configurations; ensuring ESRI SDE worked with FME Flow; checking workspaces were running and providing feedback on their optimisation; and confirming all connections were working.
The Results
A Stable, Scalable Platform and a Team Equipped to Grow With It
With a clean separation of development and production environments, the GIS team at Hutt City gained the stability, confidence, and internal capability to manage and build on their FME investment independently. Leveraging the work done within the GIS team, Locus also supported the Applications team with a solution to workflow API calls, extending the value of FME beyond its original GIS-focused deployment.
Why it Matters
For local government organisations growing their FME capability, the moment when a shared development and production environment becomes a liability is a critical inflection point. Getting that separation right and doing it in a way that transfers knowledge rather than creating ongoing dependency is what determines whether the platform becomes a strategic asset or a recurring support burden.
By utilising Locus expertise to deliver a validated, correctly configured FME environment and on-premise training, councils can scale their data integration capability with confidence, knowing their team has the foundations to maintain, optimise, and extend the platform as their needs grow.
Success Stories
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