Client

Leading British energy retailer supplying electricity and gas to millions of customers

Business objective

As part of a government-mandated smart meter rollout of roughly 53 million electric and gas meters across Great Britain, our client is responsible for deploying 5 million smart meters for their customers by 2024. This involves a target deployment rate of 1.2 million meters per year at peak. Meeting the timelines for a deployment of this scale is a significant challenge. Not achieving the mandate can result in a regulatory penalty of up to 5% of the company’s turnover, a severe commercial setback.

Our client needed to minimize the cost of smart meter deployment and realize benefits at the earliest. Deployment costs include field force operatives, non-deployment time (such as travel time), non-deployment related work, site visits per installation, cost of premature meter removals, and the geographical distribution of technicians. The benefits they were keen to realize included optimized installation time, positive impact on customer churn, increased customer satisfaction, and minimized debt propensity risk, among other outcomes.

How Wipro delivered client success

Wipro developed a deployment optimization tool (DOT), a solution that uses advanced analytics and AI to deliver a continually optimized meter deployment plan. The solution combines strategic deployment planning with operational optimization to maximize productivity while minimizing the risk of not meeting customer commitments. Some key elements of the solution are described below:

• Geography-based job clustering reduces the average travel time between meter install jobs. 
• Discrete event simulations model the daily installation process and estimate productivity.
• Optimization techniques generate deployment forecasts and prescribe deployment volumes for each cluster based on the objective drivers, eligibility constraints, and resource projections. 
• Scenario analysis enables the client to produce multiple installation plan options and baseline a preferred deployment plan by performing cost-benefit comparisons. 
• Operational deployment planning provides the ability to run push, in-fill, and pull customer campaigns across multiple channels.
• Customer eligibility for smart meters models 300+ business rules.
• Capacity planning and work monitoring dashboards help plan and monitor field force capacity.
• Wipro developed this analytics solution on the SAS Grid analytics platform.

The Impact 

• Accelerated smart meter installation rates from 120,000 in year 1 to 835,000 in year 4.
• Deviation between planned and actual rollouts decreased from 22% to 3%.
• Accurate regulatory submissions eliminate the risk of substantial financial penalties.