Support of Smart Meter Maintenance
A Dutch energy company with Spatial Workshop linked the spatial data in the GIS department with their Smart Meter Management System.
With an investment of a couple of hours the maintenance staff can now analyze faults and prioritize work orders, based on the location of the meters.
A small investment compared to the large business value. A very clear case of quick Return on Investment.
Fault analysis on basis of location
Energy companies roll out smart meters to hundreds of thousand customers in the coming years. Calls from customers concerning failure of smart meters are logged via the Customer Call Centre in spreadsheets and databases, which are again input for the maintenance group to create lists of outstanding work.
By spending a couple of hours to connect the addresses of calls with the network in the GIS within Spatial Workshop, the maintenance crew now has an immediate overview of the locations of the faults. This not only gives them an overview of the faults to be used in the Works Management system, but they can now better analyze the possible cause of failure.
Engineers can now see in a map whether faults occur on a single address or in geographic clusters. This gives the engineers additional insight in the possible reasons of the faults. Clusters of problems may indicate that faults are related to network components instead of individual meters. Faults located in a map can give valuable information about other risks or causes, like ongoing works in the neighborhood, location characteristics, etc.
This simple fact created a very quick additional RoI on the data that the energy company is storing in different operational systems.