The challenge

In order to avoid excavation damage, the Flemish Government decided that all plan applications and plan processing should be done digitally via the KLIP portal from 1 January 2016. For the city of Bruges, which processes 4,500 plan applications every year, this was the reason for seeking GIM's help. Together, they went in search of a solution for the fully automated KLIP processing, so that the road service (sewerage) and the IT department (fibreglass) of the city of Bruges would no longer have to take care of these labour-intensive tasks.

The solution

Bruges has been working with GIM for several years to support its global GIS operation and GIS counters. The city is also a user of FME, Safe Software's powerful ETL tool, which automatically retrieves, converts and integrates geographical data organisation-wide. Consequently, it was a logical decision for Bruges to rely on GIM for automatic KLIP processing as well. This resulted in a fully automatic KLIP solution via FME, grafted onto the city of Bruges' databases.

The result

GIM's KLIP solution via FME allows for the automatic monitoring of all cable and pipeline information of the city of Bruges in the context of KLIP requests and fully automatic handling of plan requests. Moreover, existing GIS processes were integrated into it.

The user-friendly interface does not require any specific IT knowledge and new users can easily be added. Thanks to this approach, the workload of the road department and the IT department of Bruges City Council was considerably reduced.