Real journeys, decisions made on numbers

The challenge

A fleet of 12,800 meters read manually 2–3 times a year, across difficult terrain: pits under cast-iron covers, a historic town centre, hillsides and scattered hamlets. The utility wanted to decide on roll-out from measured evidence, not catalogue projections.

The method

A full feasibility study: fleet analysis (91% of the fleet concentrated on a single local manufacturer), classification of installation cases, a technology matrix per scenario, and pilot design. Phase 0 on ~100 meters in the most representative conditions — including deliberately difficult points to test the fallbacks — with contractual KPIs: PDR ≥98%, valid daily read ≥99%, reception redundancy, stability after rainfall.

Timeline

The challenge

Water losses at the national average, biannual manual reads that left bursts invisible for weeks, unstructured historical data, and incoming regulatory obligations with a reduced technical team.

The solution

Remote reading as a service over LoRaWAN with cellular-backhaul gateways in the hills, district water balance and minimum night flow to catch hidden leaks, and technical-quality reports generated automatically by the platform.

The challenge

Several catchments on different legacy systems, regulatory reporting assembled by hand from heterogeneous sources, no way to aggregate by district and pressure zone, and a requirement not to replace the existing billing system.

The solution

A multi-tenant platform with a utility → municipality → district → meter hierarchy, multi-vendor meters on the same decoding engine, regulatory reports generated from measurement data, and integration with the existing billing system via API and scheduled batch feeds — the incumbent system stays in charge of the revenue cycle.