Case Study: ENSTAR Natural Gas achieves rapid, precise CAD-to-GIS migration with Safe Software’s FME

Enstar Natural Gas Company - Customer Case Study

Enstar Natural Gas Company, one of Alaska’s oldest energy utilities, needed to migrate about 5,000 non‑georeferenced AutoCAD “as‑built” drawings of distribution and transmission lines into a seamless GIS so the network could support flow modeling and tie to customer records. Alaska Map Science was hired to handle the complex migration, which was made difficult by the sheer file volume, a tight summer deadline, and important attribute information stored in undocumented AutoCAD “group” entities rather than as GIS attributes.

Alaska Map Science used Safe Software’s FME spatial ETL to automate and repeatably execute the conversion, creating custom FME mappings, TCL routines and regex parsing to extract group content, apply grid‑based georeferencing and preserve curved geometry, while logging unmatched features for manual review. The result was a fast, precise data conversion (FME scripts ran about 20 hours for the full set), successful population of an ArcSDE geodatabase, and immediate benefits: formerly hidden CAD information became accessible for network modeling, web viewing and ongoing GIS workflows.

ENSTAR Natural Gas