The rationale behind purchasing FME is often many and varied but as a product it affords you the ability to be agile and flexible as an organisation allowing you to share up to date information where, when and how its required.
I have worked with a number of FME users over the years and the main justification I hear time and again is that they just want to do the job they were originally recruited for. That is often challenged by their need to translate data between formats, burn CDs or upload to FTP sites cuts of data, import CSVs into web mapping applications etc etc. Essentially they want to engineer-out the 'mundane' tasks that they are not adding any value to as individuals. FME allows you to engineer out the mundane. Automation is key, being able to carry out what is typically 20 minutes worth of mouse clicks in MapInfo, ESRI or CAD and bundle that into a process that runs overnight with no user interaction is where the benefit lies. Especially if that task has to be done every day or every week. Now the custodian or analyst can spend the time using the GIS and their skill to interpret the data, or produce the map using their cartographic skill... the fun, intelligent bit. Not that creating an FME workspace is not fun, you understand!
With FME dealing with the mundane tasks and allowing you to extract 'information' in a neater more efficient way from your data. You as a data custodian and analyst can provide better value to your authority or municipality and therefore the citizen and with a bit of investment in FME, you will be able to provide a better ROI on yourself! After all you can buy into to a fixed license, albeit at the lowest capability end for less than 1000USD and then move through the editions as you realise the benefits.
One customer I have been working with recently has automated the updating of over 200 key performance indicators that need to be delivered monthly with FME. This consists of 50 different processes and each one before FME was employed took 3-4 days of elapsed time to collate. Each model in FME does the same work in a few minutes.
They also maintain their corporate GIS almost completely with FME, moving data between live and staging environments overnight and taking data captured in the field and making it live on the website as soon as the captured data is deposited into a directory.
All of the data that they supply to consultants and partners is also translated and restructured with one tool. It's on the tip of my tongue... They have some generic models that allow them to carry out basic publishing of their data to these partners and some processes to also publish data as Open data, with anything that shouldn't be published, stripped out...
...and that’s just one customer. Others, carry out data cleansing and setup FME as a data sentry to stop data of low quality getting into their database. Some make sure their CAD team gets access to the GIS data in a CAD appropriate standard and to the right ISO standard that they need. Some go beyond the data and use FME to manage and harvest metadata, the information about their information. Many over here in the UK also use FME to manage some or all of their Ordnance Survey base mapping processing in one way or another.
Ultimately FME is infinitely flexible and can be deployed to do many tasks. Just like Excel, most users buy FME to do 1 task and then realise it can do other things too. FME pretty much started life being the defacto CAD to GIS and vice versa transformation tool and the majority of the user base still use it for that as it’s a problem showing no signs of going away. To avoid sounding like a complete fan-boy though, FME isn't perfect, it does have things it can't do and there are problems from time to time that frustrate. However, Safe Software and the reseller community are here to deal with those issues and FMEPedia and this forum are pretty unique mines of information...
I hope you get a few other responses as it’s always good to hear of the latest innovative things people are doing with FME. I suggest you keep your eye on the newsletter as there are often some good case studies in here too.
http://www.safe.com/about/newsletter/
I hope you get your hands on FME soon...
In addition to what David said...
I see a lot of FME usage within local (i.e. city) government here in The Netherlands and I would imagine the stuff it's used for by that kind of clients over here is pretty much in line with what you'd want to use it for.
Pretty much any GIS task that can be automated can be done through FME. So it's great for repeating processes. You may spend a bit more time the first time setting it up, but once that's done you can simply rerun the process with a press of a button. Assuming the structure of your source data doesn't change, you'll get the same results out of it every time. Not only does it do things faster, it also removes the opportunity for operator errors.
In order to get management approval, try and identify say the top 3 time wasting processes that you have to do manually. Get a ballpark figure of how much time it would take to set up an FME Workbench for that (I'm sure Safe and the FME community will help you with that) and show that in due time, FME will essentially pay for itself.
Hope this helps, and if you have any more questions feel free to ask.
Take a look at this page on our web site. It has a nice PDF and info on ROI.
We also have a bunch of
success stories too.
Hopefully this will help you make a good case for FME.
Regards
Mark
Howdy,
You can collect facts and figures til doomsday and you still not be able to convince your managers. If I was in your position I'd get stuck into a 30 trial of FME desktop and crank out KMLs of your data to overlay on Google Earth. Giving a presentation may prove more convincing than a lengthy business case.
Hi,
Most local government organisations in Ireland have been using FME for the past 9 years. Since then all but one local authority is without FME; because they don't have a GIS Officer.
The main justification is automating data requests. For example, one GIS Officer has set up some scheduled tasks so that data for each department (Water, Planning etc.) is migrated to the CAD and Mapinfo and to the web on a nightly basis. Staff can then access the data without having to make the request to the GIS Officer. This has reduced the man hours spent doing trivial data conversion. This is just one of the many many uses of FME in local government but is the one that is used most for procurement justification.
The GIS Officer, Jon Hawkins in Waterford City Council (www.waterfordcity.ie) would be a good person to speak to. Let me know if you want me to put you in touch.
Hope this helps,
Annette
In short:
1) It improves(reduction) the design time of a spatial data workflow, including that you combine all steps to a single platform. Building and executing one workflow results in the time savings covering a years single use license.
2) If well written the workflow is self documenting, so others can reuse.
3) The logging, limiting input records and inspectors give you a solid debugging environment.
4) Reuse of the workflows in FME-server for a bigger community and automated tasks.
5) Very Good support for specific problems and findings with product and not at least the many nice shared examples.
And I agree with all earlier comments, including running some nice demo's Richo suggested.
- Good Luck -
