July 2020. As smart meters replace conventional meters, utilities face the challenge of receiving, cleaning, analyzing, and storing a large volume of meter data that increases exponentially over time. To support their initiatives, utilities are spending millions on smart metering projects looking for energy efficiency, asset performance, operational effectiveness, and customer experience improvements. Unfortunately, these projects are usually focused on meter data management (MDM) but ignore making any changes to the CIS, which supports TOU rates and real-time pricing processes associated with new services such as the supply of energy to electric vehicles.
To close the gap between metering and customer service processes, Open International has developed a suite of MDM functionalities in Open Smartflex V8, its holistic and extended Customer Information System (CIS). At the core of the product, Open Smartflex offers a set of customer-focused applications to achieve highly effective business operations. The solution has been designed based on successful industry practices which come as pre-configured industry models, allowing companies to accelerate implementation time in their journey to develop and streamline their core business processes. Extending its solution’s scope in the metering dimension allows Open International to address the needs of utilities who want to deliver an extraordinary customer experience using meter data readings in multiple dimensions, achieving greater efficiency and a lower TCO.
By adding MDM functionalities to its product, Open International offers utilities a modern solution that provides agents with more granular and timely information, which supports decision making in forecasting, distribution planning, customer analysis, and pricing. By providing a 360-degree view of the customers, Open Smartflex provides utilities with the necessary tools to become a more customer-centric organization, ready to thrive in a digital-first world and improve customer experience. The solution can also streamline metering processes by performing remote actions over smart meters, such as device status check, on-demand read, and meter connect/disconnect. By implementing automatic processes for quality assurance of metering information, utilities will reduce field service costs and improve billing accuracy. With Open Smartflex, an all-in-one CIS+MDM solution, utilities can also mitigate risks in implementation projects due to the complexity of systems, reduce the time to market of new services based on smart grids, ensure that the consumption and billing business rules are always synchronized, and streamline customer service processes with an end-to-end vision from the customer to every consumption detail at up to 5-minute intervals.
About this initiative, Open International’s CTO, Juan Corredor, says, “At Open, we have been working around the clock to deliver Open Smartflex V8 extended with MDM capabilities. Recently, we conducted a benchmark test where our solution was able to process 8.64 billion meter readings of a day in a 5-hour window, suggesting an outstanding processing rate of 1.5 billion readings per hour. We are ready and eager to implement this upgraded solution with our clients in the United States and Latin America to improve their operational efficiency and reduce costs”.
To learn more about Open Smartflex’s MDM functionalities, our benchmark test, and how our solution can help support your utility please visit: https://app.openintl.com/open-smartflex-mdm
Media Contacts:
Maria Corredor, US Marketing Communications Specialist, Open International
Maria del Mar Caldas, Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations Chief, Open International