IoT-Based Digital Water Metering – Utilities Journey towards Smart and Sustainable Future

Ambition

South East Water is a metropolitan water utility that delivers water, sewerage and recycled water services to more than 1.8 million people in southeast Melbourne. Each year the utility provides 142 billion liters of drinking water and collects and treats more than 136 billion liters of wastewater. From its water recycling plants, they produce around 2.8 billion liters of recycled water used for residences, businesses, agriculture and open spaces.

As part of its digital journey, South East Water wanted to build a digital information platform utilizing the Internet of Things (IoT), Operational Data Store (ODS) and leverage advanced analytics capabilities to transform its current business processes.

South East Water’s digital information platform journey started with digital meters. With 41,000 digital meters already installed across its network, the removal of legacy analog meters continues, reducing cost-to-serve by adopting IoT and analytics to build a low-cost and highly scalable digital metering solution. In addition, South East Water is a proven industry leader in innovative digital meter data gathering technologies. Its award-winning research and development team has developed, manufactured and tested several at-scale digital products that make sense of the information produced by digital meters. Marketed across Africa, the Middle East and India (ANZ) region by its subsidiary Iota, this solution provides South East Water with a commercialized, separate, non-regulated revenue source.

Action

For this project, South East Water selected Microsoft Azure as its strategic cloud service partner. Microsoft endorsed Wipro, a service partner in the ANZ region, for this digital transition. Wipro’s solution included accelerators across different domain and technology areas to future-proof the architecture and a pilot for fit-to-purpose systems to operationalize digital water metering.

Wipro researched customer and market demands, analyzed expectations from water utility CIOs, compared competitor solutions and conducted segment analysis for positioning.

The team deployed the following capabilities in 24 months:

A digital information platform that operationalized digital water metering and connected 41,000+ digital meters (June 2022) using the NBIoT platform.
Meter integration via using LWM2M protocol, integrating three different Telco IoT platforms 1) Telstra, 2) Vodafone and 3) Optus.
The data platform supports the ever-growing cloud data storage requirements and a robust analytics model; Smart dashboards for situational awareness; and advanced analytics, including operational analysis on leakage prediction, bill shock prediction and consumption pattern analysis.
The flexible rules engine manages a variety of data processing requirements.
An enterprise IT-OT integration including data from Maximo EAM, Salesforce, the legacy billing system, and the Hexagon GIS system using Dell Boomi-based ESB and PEGA-based BPM solutions.

Ambitions Realized

For South East Water, the solution is prolonging asset life, minimizing emergency maintenance costs and reducing after-hours charges as issues are tackled proactively rather than reactively. The benefits for South East Water customers have been impactful. The customer experience for those with a digital meter has been positive. The utility can now provide customers with near real-time notifications about a potential leak, and they can access granular consumption data through their mySouthEastWater online portal.

So far, the new digital meter technology has helped customers find over 4,000 leaks they did not know they had, reducing water wastage. Leak alerts have saved over $1.2 million on customer bills and a volume of 280ML water.

The solution, built in a templated approach, allows platform users to lift and shift the platform from one region to another. It also complies with the following: 1) GDPR, 2) IoT Cyber Security, 3) IoT Data Governance, and 4) Interoperability with multiple telcos and field devices, making it a robust industry solution for digital water metering.