Hi all! Welcome to our August FME Community User Spotlight. Every month, we spotlight a user in the community whose active participation and helpful contributions have been invaluable. We’re excited to highlight their experiences and insights! ⭐
User Spotlight: Drew Purzycki |
What company do you currently work for?
Timmons Group
What's your current job role and title?
Senior Technical Analyst
Tell us more about what you do and how you use FME?
A large portion of the projects I work on revolve around Esri's Utility Network and helping clients migrate their data and implement the solution for their organization. FME is extremely useful for transforming data from the Geometric Network data model to the Utility Network data model as well as assisting with data cleanup and standardization, automating iterative workflows, and conducting efficient QA/QC processes for our clients.
Why did you join the FME Community?
I can contribute a lot of my FME knowledge to the wizards who have come before me - the folks at Safe, users on FME Community who had the same obscure questions years prior, and my (very patient) coworkers. Having the ability to easily find an answer, or to provide an answer to someone else, through FME Community is a way to expand and share that knowledge. The more we support each other, the more we learn.
What did you do to get onboarded with FME, and what would you recommend to someone just starting out?
What tips do you have for users on how to get the most out of the FME Community?
When posting a question, be as specific as you can including any methods or troubleshooting steps you've already tried. And stay up to date on the events going on! Engaging with other users is a great way to expand your FME horizons.
Tell us about some of the exciting use cases you've built using FME.
While I love working on Utility Network projects, my favourite use case was a project I presented on with my colleague, Bryan Chase, at the Peak of Data and AI Conference in 2025. I created a workbench for a client that read in various census and billing data, and merged with the client's geographic data to allow for detailed analysis on equitable billing rates within their service area. Bryan then created a dashboard that would be updated as the workbench was run each month, so the results could be easily displayed and distributed among their internal stakeholders.
What's one of your favourite tips or tricks for using FME?
Learning new hotkeys is one of the small joys in life -- finding more efficient ways of accomplishing the same thing can sometimes be eye-opening! Take the time to learn a few shortcuts and build from there. Also, did you know you can drag a detached annotation over a transformer to attach it?
If you were stranded on an island and could only bring three things with you, what would they be?
A disc golf basket, a disc, and my Jalen Hurts Eagles jersey.
If you could work from anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Hawaii! Beautiful beaches, delicious food, and amazing hikes.
Would you like to be featured on Spotlight of the Month? Fill out this form here.
We’ll see you next month! 😊