Communities enjoy reliable water service through smart data insights
Overview
A leading 24x7 water and sewerage services provider in Australia sought to modernize how it connects and manages essential services across its network. With a mission to foster healthier communities, the utility embarked on a transformation journey to digitally connect operations, improve customer experience and reduce environmental impact.
Our partnership with the client build an intelligent, cloud-based data platform capable of analyzing both structured and unstructured data. This solution enabled proactive outage detection, anomaly monitoring and real-time asset management ushering in a new era of efficiency and customer trust.
The Challenge
The client faced the challenge of digitally connecting water and sewerage services to improve customer experience and reduce environmental impact. They needed to optimize operating costs and ensure proper analysis of customer insights from diverse data sources.
A critical requirement was to detect anomalies in water pressure and enable outage prediction to minimize revenue loss and high maintenance costs. Additionally, they sought to improve asset management and reduce water loss.
The Solution
As a part of the engagement, our team designed an intelligent data platform on MS Azure with a composable architecture covering data ingestion, data management, reporting and insights.
- The platform provided static data analysis of water flow trends and forecasted hourly water flow for the next seven days using Microsoft Power BI
- It converted phone conversation audio into text files and extracted customer details using NLP to identify outage locations
- An AI/ML-based solution minimized unplanned outages by analyzing water logger data and identifying anomalies
- The solution identified low flow incidents and outage flags across channels like call centers and social media to confirm outages and reduce false positives
- Our team also created an intuitive dashboard for regional managers to provide real-time incident data with key metrics
- The dashboard also provided early warnings about illegal pollution of the sewerage network
The Impact
The intelligent data platform delivered significant environmental, operational and financial benefits for the client.
- 20% energy savings by optimizing water pressure and reducing pumping loads
- 40% reduction in burst pipes through predictive maintenance
- 20% drop in water leaks, improving resource efficiency
- Improved customer satisfaction with faster resolution and proactive communication
- Enhanced sustainability maturity
Beyond the Numbers
This transformation moved the client beyond traditional water management, enabling a proactive and data-driven approach to service delivery. By harnessing the power of intelligent data and AI/ML, we helped the client not only achieve significant operational efficiencies but also foster greater environmental stewardship.
This strategic shift ensures the client can sustain high-quality services, mitigate risks effectively and build healthier, more resilient communities.
Celebrating Success
Our efforts in building this intelligent data platform significantly enhanced the client's capabilities, leading to improved service reliability and an elevated Total Experience for both the community and operational teams. This success story exemplifies how advanced digital solutions can transform essential public services, contributing to a more sustainable future.
This achievement reflects our environmental leadership as detailed in our FY 2024 Sustainability Report. We have reduced water usage by 40% in India since 2020 and replenished 32 times more water than it consumed across its communities in FY24. These achievements adds on to the powerful environmental impact of intelligent water and asset management solutions.
