CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY
How Wellington Electricity Automated a Critical Data Pipeline
By replacing a manual process with an automated FME flow, Wellington Electricity ensured its critical Outage Management System stays up-to-date with network changes, reducing updates from weeks to days while eliminating manual steps.
Weeks to days
Reduced network updates into the critical Outage Management System
Eliminated manual steps
Replaced time-consuming spatial data extraction and validation before equipment has moved on
Proactive schema validation
Identifies structure changes before data is loaded to ensure stability
Improved data accuracy
Reliable spatial information helps the control room locate and resolve issues faster
Manual data pipelines are a major bottleneck for utility providers, especially when managing critical systems like an OMS. By utilizing FME to automate the translation, validation, and delivery of our spatial network data, we’ve cut update cycles from weeks to days, reduced the risk of manual error, and ensured our control room operators always have a reliable, up-to-date view of the network.”
– Ariel Lopez, Senior GIS Analyst, Wellington Electricity
The Challenge
Accelerating Update Cycles for Critical Control Room Systems
Utility providers like Wellington Electricity manage complex networks that are constantly changing as new connections are added, assets are upgraded, and lines are re-routed. Keeping track of these changes in a Geographic Information System (GIS) is only half the battle; that data must also be moved into other operational systems, such as an Outage Management System (OMS), so control room operators have an accurate view of the network during a storm or emergency.
For Ariel Lopez, Senior GIS Analyst at Wellington Electricity, the challenge lay in how that data moved between systems. The existing process for updating the Intergraph InService OMS with the latest network data from GE Smallworld was slow and required multiple manual steps.
Because the process was time-consuming, updates were only performed every few weeks. This meant the OMS didn’t always reflect recent changes on the ground, creating potential blind spots for operators trying to locate and resolve network issues.
The data translation process was complex, requiring specific extraction routines, coordinate transformations, and strict schema validation to ensure the data format matched what the OMS expected. Any error in the manual steps could cause the update to fail, leading to delays and additional work for the GIS team.
The Solution
Automating Survey Workflows with FME
Wellington Electricity used FME to automate the entire data pipeline, from extraction to delivery.
The FME workspace acts as a bridge between GE Smallworld and the Intergraph InService OMS. It automatically extracts the relevant spatial data, handles the required coordinate transformations, and structures the data into the precise format needed by the OMS.
Instead of waiting weeks for manual updates, the automated FME flow runs regularly, ensuring that network changes are pushed into the control room system in days rather than weeks.
The workflow also includes proactive validation steps. Before data is loaded into the critical OMS environment, FME checks the data structure and attributes against predefined rules. If any anomalies or schema mismatches are detected, the system flags them immediately, allowing the GIS team to resolve issues before they affect operational systems.
Technical Highlight
Under the FME Hood
The automated pipeline relies on FME’s ability to connect directly to utility network data models and handle complex spatial relationships. The workspace extracts data from the source GIS, maps attributes to the target schema using the AttributeManager, and applies validation logic to ensure data integrity. By automating these technical steps, Wellington Electricity removed the friction from their data supply chain.
The Results
Efficiency, Accuracy, and Confidence
The move to an automated pipeline has delivered immediate benefits for Wellington Electricity. The time required to update the critical Outage Management System has dropped from weeks to days, ensuring control room operators work with highly accurate network information.
By eliminating manual data handling steps, the GIS team has reduced the risk of human error and freed up valuable technical resources to focus on other high-priority tasks.
The control room now has greater confidence in the data feeding their systems, which helps speed up response times and improves operational decision-making during major weather events or network outages.
Why it Matters
The project has demonstrated how utility providers can use spatial data automation to improve operational efficiency and support mission-critical systems.
By utilizing FME to orchestrate the translation and validation of spatial data between core utility platforms, infrastructure operators can eliminate data latency and ensure control room teams have the accurate insights they need when it matters most—optimizing network resilience and supporting faster response times for the community.
Success Stories
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Wellington Electricity built a fully automated data pipeline using FME Flow to process daily registry files from electricity retailers, overcoming inconsistent file headers and eliminating manual steps. The solution now runs in-house, increasing efficiency, resilience, and control over critical data workflows.
Keeping the Lights On with Smarter Data Pipelines
Wellington Electricity manages the electricity distribution network for the Wellington region, relying on daily data from electricity retailers to keep their records accurate and up-to-date.
These retailer-supplied files, known as registry files, contain essential information about customer connections, meter details, and service changes. Each day, multiple registry files are delivered via SFTP (secure file transfer protocol), a standard method for exchanging sensitive data between systems.
The real challenge came with processing those files automatically. Although the columns in each file always appeared in the same order, the column names varied between retailers, making it difficult to build a reliable, automated workflow based on standard attribute headers.
Building a Resilient Workflow for Daily Data Delivery
To address this, the Wellington Electricity team set out to build an internal, end-to-end solution using FME Flow, automating the pipeline from file retrieval through to processing and publishing and removing the need for ongoing support from third-party providers.
They approached this in two parts: First, they built a workspace to connect to the SFTP server, identify the previous day’s files, and download them. This task now runs automatically each day. Next, a second workspace was developed to dynamically process each .csv file.
Rather than relying on the column headers, the workspace re-maps the data based on column position, effectively sidestepping the inconsistency of attribute names. Lastly, a change detection is run and updated values are written to a database after which the input files are archived.
As part of the setup, the team built in flexibility and resilience, separating out the retrieval and processing stages so they could easily re-run jobs if needed. All of this is orchestrated through FME Flow Automation, which handles scheduling, error notifications, manual triggers for re-processing when needed and email notifications for both success and failure events.
The result is a robust and adaptable system that can be managed entirely in-house
Tackling a solution of this scale with FME Flow was a new step for the team but the benefits were clear straight away. The pipeline runs smoothly, automatically publishing registry data to where it needs to go, with no manual touchpoints required.
This project is a strong example of how smart use of automation can unlock efficiency, agility, and long-term cost savings, even in the most data-heavy operations.
How Wellington Electricity Automated a Critical Data Pipeline
Wellington Electricity built a resilient, fully automated pipeline using FME Flow to process daily registry files, eliminating manual steps and increasing control over essential data workflows