Client Background

Client: Leading digital utility company

Industry: Utilities

Products/Services: Generation, transmission and distribution of electricity and water

Area of Operation: Dubai

Challenge

A public-service electric and water company serving more than 1 million customers in the Middle East rolled out 2 million smart meters and sensors as a part of its smart grid, along with electric vehicle (EV) chargers and modern asset-management systems. The various information systems were not integrated with other data sources and lacked the smart grid analytics features necessary to derive insights from the vast pool of data that would enable the utility to better serve its customers. 

The company looked to implement several digital initiatives, including an asset health center built on an analytical platform, to better leverage its operational data. With this multi-faceted strategy, the utility hoped to bolster customer service through digital means, improve service availability by monitoring asset health to prevent outages, reduce asset downtime by predicting asset failures, and optimize its asset-maintenance expenditures.

Solution

Wipro created an analytical solution architecture that could handle the scale, speed and variety of data generated across applications, integration, security, and infrastructure while extracting actionable insights for business teams. Based on open-source platforms and components, the solution used Cloudera Hadoop and leveraged the utility’s existing investments in SAP HANA and Tableau to minimize costs. Wipro then recommended IPS Energy’s APM suite, an asset performance management and maintenance resource, to integrate with the other components in the landscape. This combination would enable the Middle Eastern utility to establish an asset health center to monitor asset health indicators, deepen its insights, and prevent asset failures, ultimately improving the customer experience.

The new platform integrated with various data sources and continually ingested data into the data lake, with information organized per industry models and managed using governance frameworks and meta-data processes. With this new smart grid analytics functionality, the public utility could develop, deliver and adopt business use cases at a much faster pace. These uses cases, in turn, would allow the company to meet business needs ranging from asset-condition monitoring, investment planning, and IEEE indices to KPIs, reliability analytics, and EV charging statistics, among others. 

Business Impact

Using its new asset health center and smart grid analytics abilities, the Middle Eastern utility bridged the gap between collecting data from business silos to applying analytics and extracting business insights from consolidated information. The losses in the electricity network, currently at 3.3%, are expected to decline as the asset health center enables predictive diagnostics and faster decision making. Overall decision making was also improved, as insights from multiple devices could be seamlessly integrated with business processes and shared via intuitive reports and dashboards that provided accessibility and visibility for the entire asset registry.

The utility also achieved its goal of improving customer service. Capitalizing on its new use cases, the company was able to reduce customer-service disruptions and provide higher-quality services, increasing customer satisfaction from 90% to the mid-90s.