How many have you captured?
Customer related
- Help customers find leaks early to avoid bill shock
- Improve customer relations regarding water leaks and other issues
- Generally better able to communicate with residents
- Resolve billing issues more quickly and easily with fewer person-hours
- Easier to resolve other customer complaints
- Avoid spending hours and hours to resolve an issue where "a picture is worth a thousand words"
- Improved management of strata sub-metering; less hours needed
- Get accurate readings at the exact date of property changeover
Water loss reduction
- Online water balancing for DMA and leakage management
- Easier to find leaks, reduce leak run times, early detection and notification
- Assist in the early identification of major breaks, i.e. less high impact, avoid negative PR and costly bursts (as they are almost always proceeded by a smaller leak)
- Improved response times
Demand management/drought response
- Better understanding of water use
- Education opportunity
- Demand management - actively influence water use
- More options and more prepared for effective drought management
- Better and easier checking and ensuring compliance with water restrictions
- Receiving early data for feedback on how much education/messaging/restrictions impact demand
- Simple to identify (prove) and communicate breaches of restrictions
- Data and usage patterns determine how many people live at a residence. Permits to differentiate between essential and non-essential use. It makes it possible to drive the right behaviour through demand-based pricing, e.g. significant extra $/kL charges for non-essential water use.
- Better emergency water management during fires but also in times of flood (water treatment capacity severely constrained due to poor inflow water quality, limited power, equipment failure, etc.)
Increased revenue/better billing accuracy
- Increased revenue with electronic meters (4% more)
- No more leak rebates (as customers get told when they have a leak)
- Increased billing accuracy, no manual read errors
- More timely and frequent, including, e.g. monthly billing or fully automated electronically
- Improved cashflow
- Follow up earlier with customers having payment issues or disputing bills - less write-offs
- Re Bulk Supplier: Find early, quantify and document easily bulk billing discrepancies
Admin, controlling and reporting
- Streamline data flow.
- Streamline reporting
- Consistency of all meter-related information ("one source of truth")
- Less time spent entering the same data multiple times
- More accuracy, less time spent chasing errors
- More accurate billing and payments to the bulk supplier
- Integrate with other systems and share data with others, e.g. bulk suppliers or industry
- Integrate with trade waste systems
- Better pricing for SDF
Operational benefits/planning
- Better, more accurate data for planning new infrastructure. Could delay augmentation of pipes, expansion of plants, or new plant(s) - deferred capital cost. Reduce size, more accurate design base, significant cost and risk reduction.
- Optimise the size of assets, e.g. pipes
- Resolution of operational inefficiencies. See outliers early and easily.
- All readings taken at the same time, easier and more accurate water balance
- Understand and identify possible operational issues, e.g., online water balancing may highlight that another zone was supplied from the same reservoir or that DMA was breached.
- Assist to pick up possible operational disruptions early
- Identify pressure fluctuations, less risk for pipe breaks
- More active, less reactive maintenance
- Feed into hydraulic modelling.
- Improved public health
- Remain in line with other Councils/Utilities
- Keep up with technology, not being left behind on future efficiency gains and operational demands
