Automating the import of historic planning data

Warrington Borough Council needed to update their land search records to include building control information. With a two year backlog of 20,000 records, they needed a solution that could quickly deal with high volumes of data.

6 weeks saved

Fewer delays

£14k saved in staff costs

The Challenge

Warrington Borough Council had a building control application that didn’t integrate with their local land searches application. They had a two year backlog of approximately 20,000 records which needed to be entered into their local land searches system.

The manual entry of the data was anticipated to take a full-time member of staff approximately 6 months to complete, resulting in significant delays for the users who required access to the data.

The Solution

The Council needed a way to automate the entry of the huge number of historic records. We worked with them to establish an FME process which performed the following:

Automated the input of records into the database.
Linked competent persons’ XML files to LLPG BLPU polygons.
Reported on incomplete XML files that needed manual input.

Warrington Borough Council automate data entry with FME.

FME® automates data manipulation and transformation

Data rarely arrives in your environment in a state that’s ready to use. The repetitive tasks required to get it into a usable form are laborious and costly. FME® automates these data manipulation and transformation tasks, leaving you to work much more efficiently with your newly optimised data set.

Here’s the problem; you have lots of data from lots of different internal and external sources, but managing it all can be difficult. You’re faced with a unique set of challenges that have a large impact on the way you work:

Driving value for your organisation by making the most of your business intelligence.
Managing the complex combination of data sources, formats and destinations.
Dealing with evolving data, resources and requirements.