Download Flinders Ports primarily use their GIS for visualization of

Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Michael Collins – Autodesk Consulting
GS5043
The recent resources and mining boom in Australia has been a big win for Australian port
authorities; however, a rapidly expanding business can create problems for organizations whose IT
systems are not dynamic or powerful enough to keep up. With the adoption of Autodesk® spatial
technologies—Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise, Map 3D and FDO—Flinders Ports is able to not only
meet the demands of a constantly changing corporate landscape, but also save money and minimize
risk. This presentation shows how this has been achieved at Flinders Ports, including looking at some of
the challenges unique to the needs of a port authority.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this class, you will be able to:
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Explain the key technical capabilities that made Autodesk technologies the first choice for Flinders
Ports
Describe the issues faced by GIS/IT departments in a rapidly developing organization
Describe how this has been achieved by looking at a real customer case study
Explain how Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise, AutoCAD Map 3D, and FDO can address major issues
faced by GIS/IT departments
About the Speaker
Michael has 10 years of experience in IT project delivery throughout the Asia Pacific region
including Australia, Thailand, India and Singapore. In that time, he has gained extensive
experience to all parts of the SDLC. Michael currently works in the Geospatial Division for
Autodesk Consulting in Melbourne, and has recently played a critical role in the deployment of
both Australia’s first Topobase™ site and the regions’ largest implementation of MapGuide®
Enterprise.
[email protected]
Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Flinders Ports
Flinders Ports is a privately owned port management company with 7 major ports:
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Port Adelaide
Port Lincoln
Port Pirie
Klein Point
Port Giles
Thevenard
Wallaroo
Mission
To provide port related services and infrastructure to satisfy the needs of the market and to
achieve or exceed shareholders' ongoing financial expectations.
Vision
Flinders Ports will be recognised as the most customer focused and customer responsive port
manager in the markets in which we operate.
Flinders Ports is committed to improving port services to the benefit of existing trades and
assisting in the development of new business. The Company continues to expand its port
facilities to meet the demands of its customers.
With the development and growth of the mining sector in South Australia, Flinders Ports is
looking to develop all its ports to offer a competitive supply chain solution to the industry.
Flinders Ports offers the following services:
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Port Management
Land Infrastructure Management
Shipping Infrastructure Management
Marine control
Survey
Pilotage
Launch Services
Mooring
Port logistics consultancy
Coordination of ship services (power, waste, water, tugs)
Hydrographic Surveying
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Flinders Ports GIS Usage Overview
Flinders Ports primarily use their GIS for visualization of asset and property data. The asset
group manage data related to navigation assets such as beacons, lead lines and turning basins.
This data is visualized using symbols and styling derived from international standard marine
cartography. The GIS is the primary tool used for asset managers to plan maintenance tasks.
Property managers use the GIS to visualize the location of entities such as titles, leases,
easements and buildings. This helps greatly with understanding the interaction of the entities
such as which easements cross a lease, or where a particular companies leases are in relation
to each other.
Asset Information – A navigation beacon selected
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Property Information – A lease and easement selected
More recently, Flinders Ports has added data for mining and logistics purposes such as
tenement polygons, resource locations and transport infrastructure. This data is helping them
realize their goals of being a broader player in the logistics industry. In the future there are also
plans to integrate with a vessel tracking system so that users can see live feeds of ship
locations and visualize berth usage.
Mining Information
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Issues faced by GIS/IT departments in a rapidly developing organization
Flinders Ports are a rapidly changing organization who is undergoing significant structural
change within their I.T. and GIS departments. Systems being implemented, replaced or
upgraded span asset management, port management, property management, vessel tracking
as well as GIS. The following sections will take a look at some of the challenges faced by such
rapidly developing organizations. This is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of such
challenges, while it will focus mostly on the experience of Flinders Ports, the challenges
described are certainly not unique to them.
Legacy GIS and Limits to Growth
The follow are some key areas where Flinders Ports was experiencing limitations from their
existing GIS.
Difficult to add/change capability
Flinders Ports required adding whole new data sets into their GIS with minimal effort, these data
sets also needed to change and grow over time as business need arises. With any new data
added, functionality to make it useful must follow, this includes searching the data and
effectively viewing attribute information. Their legacy GIS required customization and technical
intervention to achieve this.
Flinders Ports I.T. are in the process of upgrading, replacing and changing many information
systems. Modern systems rarely stand alone and it needs to be relatively simple to respond to
changes in the broader ecosystem. The legacy GIS was quite rigid in this respect.
Old technology
Problems surrounding the use of old and antiquated technologies are numerous. Primary
problems are around obtaining or retaining human resources who have the skillset to support
such systems or enhance them. This can be both costly and also risky. Technologies that are
no longer supported by their vendors in particular carry a higher risk and hinder the
advancement of surrounding systems due to compatibility issues (a great [sic] example of this is
the retention of IE6 as some corporations SOE browser because of an old web application that
is not supported on newer generation browsers).
The Flinders Ports legacy GIS based on Xmarc Formida Fire suffered most of these ailments.
Risk of personnel turnover
If too much knowledge is kept by too few individuals then that knowledge could be easily lost.
The heavily customised nature of the legacy system at Flinders Ports posed this risk, a single
resource was the silo of knowledge for the technical foundation of this system.
Non compliance with corporate standards
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Compliance with corporate standards helps to lower cost of ownership and reduce risk. For
Flinders Ports, standardising all database dependant systems on SQL Server means making
best use of licensing fees and ensuring a minimal amount of RDBMS skill needs to be kept in
house. The use of Oracle by the legacy GIS system meant ongoing and expensive Oracle
licensing fees plus the need to have access to Oracle administration skillsets.
Desktop client vs web client
The use of a desktop based GIS for general user (read only) access was limiting to Flinders
Ports in terms of the audience that it could be distributed to and in terms of the network
administration overhead. There was also the risk of longer term compatibility issues especially
given the legacy system technology was no longer being kept up to date with modern operating
systems.
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Solution Using MapGuide and Map 3D (or Civil 3D)
A solution to address the problems listed above was implemented using Autodesk MapGuide
Enterprise and continued use of Map 3D. Key attributes of this system are:
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Spatial data stored in SQL Server database
Data access via FDO
Web based read only access via MapGuide
Create/Edit data access via Map 3D
Database and application level integration
Architecture
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Solution Advantages
FDO supports wide range of data formats
The ability to incorporate data in a wide range of formats is important for the flexibility of the
system to support current and future data needs. Translation and migration of data between
formats can be tricky and as such being able to consume data in its native format keeps things
easy and minimizes the likelihood of requiring expert involvement or custom ETL processes.
SQL Server
Having the core spatial data stored in SQL Server means that Flinders Ports has completed
their I.T. strategy of standardizing on SQL Server and decommission the Oracle system. This
both saves money and narrows the required skill base. Also having a single RDBMS makes it
easier to integrate the data at the database level. Database views have been widely used at
Flinders Ports to achieve data integration between the GIS and other domain systems such as
the property and asset management systems.
Ease of expansion
The use of MapGuide Studio for map authoring and configuration empowers Flinders Ports
business to be self-sufficient in adding and changes map configurations. Administrators can
add new layers, change themes, create entirely new maps, add new searches and control the
map UI all via Studio. This flexibility not only caters to an environment of expansion and change
but also minimizes time consuming and costly engagement of the I.T. department.
Web based
Using a cross browser compatible web client for most users means zero footprint for
deployment and minimizes compatibility issues across operating systems.
Modern technology
There are many benefits of adopting modern/common technology.
 Road map / upgrades: benefit from software vendors addition of functionality, product
upgrades and ongoing compatibility. MapGuide and Map 3D are both actively enhanced
and maintained by Autodesk
 Open source based: MapGuide is based on an open source project and benefits from
an active open source community constantly adding value to the project
 Expert resources more widely available
 Vendor support: MapGuide Enterprise base product support available from Autodesk
GIS used primarily for spatial functions
While previous incarnations of Flinders Ports GIS have incorporated various business functions,
the new solution focuses on spatial data viewing and management, the core functions of a GIS.
Flinders Ports corporate strategy is to move away from the GIS housing other business domain
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
functions such as property and asset management, and employ specialist applications to deal
with those domains. Integration with such applications is essential, as is the GIS’s flexibility to
deal with the changes that occur as this strategy is realized.
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Project Implementation
It is not the purpose of this class to go too deeply into the project implementation details,
however we’ll mention a few key points that were important to the success of the project.
Getting the data right
This is essential for any GIS implementation project. Close co-operation with the customer to
make their data structure fit for purpose was a vital step in ensuring the data integrity and ease
of maintenance going forward. This main task here was normalization of the data.
Database integration
A primary goal for Flinders Ports is to have their GIS maintain spatial information, but to also link
in real time to the attribute data associated with spatial features. In order to realize this, a
database level integration was designed to use views to join the data between systems.
MapGuide employs these views directly as layer feature sources and Map 3D employs the
spatial tables and views joined via FDO feature joins. The architecture is demonstrated in this
diagram which is a cut down logical view of the GIS database structure.
Development of Custom Components
Whilst it is seen as best practice to utilize out of box functionality as much as possible, it is rare
that all of a customer’s requirements can be filled in this way. In these cases it is necessary to
develop a custom component. The next section will detail exactly what was done for Flinders
Ports. However for any customer, we consider the following items important:
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Understanding what additions will add most value
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Understanding where base product is insufficient
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
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Keeping it generic
Training
Administrator training for the Flinders Ports employees who would be responsible for map
authoring and system maintenance going forward was key to empowering the customer to be
self-sufficient. With knowledge of Studio, the customer is able to maintain and expand the
mapping system with little or no intervention from either Autodesk Consulting or their own I.T.
department. A testament to this success is the addition of the data set surrounding mining
information that Flinders Ports has added themselves since going live with MapGuide
Enterprise.
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Flinders Ports - A GIS Customer Success Story
Custom Components
This section lists the custom components that were developed as part of the project. The focus
was on adding value to the user experience.
New Feature Attribute Panel
The out of box feature attribute panel was identified as too simplistic for use by Flinders Ports,
so we replaced this with a custom version that supports the following:
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Tabbed interface
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Identify records by data from any field in tab label
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Add feature level command buttons
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Intelligent data formatting depending on data type
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Display related features (via foreign keys)
Store Photos Against Features
Photos of features are primarily used by the asset management department who require up to
date photos of navigation beacons to log and track maintenance issues. We developed
capability for the system to upload photos against any feature and supported the following:
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View / Add / Edit / Delete photos
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Store attributes such as title and description with photos
High Quality Printing – TruePrint
Developed by Autodesk Consulting for generic use by MapGuide customers, the TruePrint
application addresses a weakness in the MapGuide base product; lack of high quality or large
scale printing. Highlight features are:
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Uses 1-Click publishing
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No client side installation required
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Allows high DPI and large page sizes
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Layout options – legend, disclaimer, logo etc
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