One Map to Rule Them All: Improving Infrastructure Planning and Resilience in New Zealand

Have you ever wondered why someone is digging up the road outside your house three months after it had just been resealed? Numerous agencies need to perform work on the road, often with little coordination, and these works impact road users, businesses and communities, increase carbon emissions and affect the local economy. In New Zealand, not-for-profit foundation Digital Built Aotearoa (DBA) is the home of the National Forward Works Viewer (NFWV), a single authoritative source of shared work programmes enabling a ‘dig once’ approach. Using FME Form and FME Flow, NFWV ingests, aggregates, and maps project data from multiple sources into one schema, giving users visibility into the ‘who, what, where and when’ of planned infrastructure projects. This visibility enables clash and opportunity detection, allowing organisations to work together, sequence their projects more effectively, save money, reduce disruption, mitigate health and safety risks, avoid costly rework, and improve asset longevity. With 10 councils subscribing, nearly 2,000 users, and over 50,000 projects in the system, NFWV is making a tangible difference.

In this presentation, we’ll talk about the drivers, the benefits, and the challenges of setting up a collaborative platform that so many different organizations contribute to and use. We’ll also talk about some of the technical implementation details of integrating the scheduling programmes of over 30 different organizations into a single, live platform.