Case Study
Utility company reduced operations costs by 50% with advanced metering infrastructure solution
CLIENT
Founded more than a century ago, this natural gas utility serves more than 20 million customers in the southwestern part of the United States.
CHALLENGE
End-of-life AMI system needed to be replaced
The company’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system—that consisted of six million smart meters and approximately 4,500 data collection units (DCUs)—was nearing the end of its life and needed to be replaced. With more than 300 million data transactions per day, equating to more than 24 TB of data per year, the new AMI system would need to provide 30-day moving averages for every hour across the meter footprint and provide analytical capabilities to proactively detect and resolve meter issues.
TRANSFORMATION
Cloud-based solution provided modern AMI network management
After a thorough needs analysis, we designed a UST IQ-based AMI solution that could easily handle the massive amount of data and provide interactive dashboards to effectively manage the meter network. The solution was deployed in an AWS Cloud environment with a bidirectional data flow between the solution and the company’s SAP data warehouse. Because UST hosts and manages the solution with a 1-minute downtime SLA, the utility’s operations team can focus on maintaining its smart meter network to provide exceptional customer service without worrying about the system itself.
Now, the company has a modern, robust, data-driven AMI solution that can:
- Display the health of its meter network at all times—thanks to near real-time data transmissions from meters and DCUs as well as KPI dashboards that showcase network exceptions for meters that may need attention
- Provide detailed, filterable data to accurately triage faulty or damaged devices—including data transmission call logs, graphs and models, street view images, heat maps, and other interactive maps with overlays for weather, earthquakes, and floods
- Sense and identify potential adverse events—enabling the company to dispatch technicians to proactively resolve problems, such as device connectivity issues, power outages, or defective smart meters
- Help operations quickly assess the “restore effort”—by pinpointing key metrics for how many meters need service, how many technicians should be dispatched, and how many customers need to be notified
- Provide insights to proactively maintain the meter and DCU network—to maximize the longevity of its expensive metering equipment
IMPACT
The client realized a 50% annual cost savings
The UST IQ solution has enabled the client to accelerate its emergency response to prevent catastrophic gas utility issues, maintain service continuity, and provide top-notch customer service. Its operations team can also proactively respond to system issues when exception alerts pop up and better allocate resources to repair meters and DCUs with precise geo-location capabilities. The client has also achieved these impressive metrics:
- A projected 50% annual operational cost savings over its legacy system—thanks to the cost-effective SaaS pricing model, enabling the company to eliminate its expensive on-premise infrastructure and reallocate IT personnel who no longer need to maintain the in-house system
- A 300% reduction in data processing time—using 5-minute micro-batch data streaming to transmit data in near real-time
- Over 300 million records processed every two hours—every day