Network Waitaki is an electricity distribution company that distributes electricity from the national grid to consumers’ properties. Network Waitaki’s core business is the provision, operation, and management of electricity lines infrastructure.
The Background
Network Waitaki were encumbered by an older web service technology implemented using the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) protocol designed for the exchange of structured information but without a current interface had resulted in data interoperability challenges.
The Challenge
Network Waitaki has a web service provided by Technology One that was intended to be used for extracting asset details to synchronise with the Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) network layers.
The web service was implemented using the SOAP protocol which is complex, relatively slow and has been superseded by newer, more lightweight protocols. There are no current interfaces for SOAP, so Network Waitaki was at a “dead end”.
The Results
As SOAP uses XML for all requests and responses, a request can be composed in XML and using the power of FME, Locus was able to return the data to a tabular format for use in a modern and accessible database.
A further complication encountered by Locus were the numerous user extensions that added extra fields that were customised for the obsolete SOAP output. Here Locus was able to create a unique FME transformer, with conditional capability, and intelligently mapped the anonymous fields back into an equivalent set.
These results enabled meant the client was able to successfully extract the legacy asset information and compare it with the information in its GIS.
Through Locus’s solution, Network Waitaki achieved quality assurance for its stakeholders, the effective and robust workflow updating its GIS with missing attributes, ensuring a future of guaranteed data access for Network Waitaki and its customers.
The Future
Network Waitaki continues to work with FME to deliver ongoing productivity gains.
