Welcome to our September FME Community User Spotlight! Every month, we’ll be spotlighting a user in the community whose active participation and helpful contributions have been invaluable to the community. We’re excited to highlight their experiences and insights!
User Spotlight: Marc Graham @mgg_beca
What company do you currently work for?
Beca Ltd., one of Asia Pacific’s largest independent advisory, design and engineering consultancies.
What’s your current job role and title?
Spatial Application Specialist
Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?
I manage our FME Flow and ArcGIS Enterprise deployments, while assisting with licensing, R&D, technical questions, integration challenges, and staff mentoring.
We use FME for all types of ETL workflows, with an increasing focus on 3D/BIM integration challenges between different systems. The improvements in BIM-focused data types such as Revit, Navisworks, and IFC are highly appreciated in an AEC context. Moving data between systems and integrating different product outputs in CDEs and digital twins can be complex, and FME helps to achieve this.
Manipulating large laser scanned point clouds can also be challenging due to file sizes and limitations in other software, but FME has been helpful in re-projecting and translating these to align with other datasets.
Our GIS team uses FME Form and Flow daily for project delivery. It has become an essential tool in ensuring repeatable, results-driven workflows. We deliver data to internal and external clients, generate reports, do complex spatial analysis, populate web GIS datasets and dashboards, push data between systems, etc.
Why did you join the FME Community?
Two reasons:
- To get answers to questions that I had. I have noticed that the FME community is very engaged, and very rarely do posts get left unanswered.
- To be able to provide feedback to the development team through product ideas and suggestions. Although, it is a bit embarrassing when some of my ideas turn out to be features that I didn’t know already existed, but that’s still a learning process.
What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?
- Search first. Most of the time if you have a question, someone else has posted something similar.
- Watch the webinars, they’re awesome. Although the timings are a bit tricky for New Zealand, I still enjoy watching the recordings.
Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you’ve built using FME.
FME is integral for converting data exported from Autodesk Infraworks as FBX files into GIS compatible data for web based visualization. It makes the process highly repeatable as designs change and allows rapid publishing to a WebGIS environment.
Not sure how exciting it is, but these days I often use FME for ArcGIS Enterprise administrative tasks, such as auditing users, licenses, and content management. One popular FME App is our project onboarding tool. It allows users to enter the name of a project from our Project Management System. It then queries Microsoft Entra ID Group information and generates a corresponding Group in ArcGIS Enterprise and links the two together to enable SSO Group membership.
We have several workspaces published to FME flow that allow users to do some ArcGIS Licensing self-service such as transferring mobile worker licenses between two users,allowing us to reduce administrative overhead. This frees our admins up for doing more interesting tasks.
In a previous role I used FME as part of a workflow for managing a UXO (Unexploded Ordnance) clearance dataset in the Solomon Islands, which was a highlight.
What’s one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?
I have some templated workspaces set up with commonly used readers and writers already loaded and populated with connections. This allows me to quickly get started and just insert the transformers I need for this particular workflow.
If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?
A solar powered fridge full of food and drinks, a rigged up fishing rod, and a PLB (Personal Locator Beacon) for when I am ready to be picked up.
If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?
A superyacht with Starlink.
