Sagacity, in partnership with Clear Business Water, have announced that the ‘Ready to Read’ project has been awarded as a winner of the 2024 non-household Market Improvement Fund, facilitated by MOSL.
The Market Improvement Fund has been established to support the delivery of innovative projects that will benefit the non-household market and its customers and align with priority market outcomes of value creation, customer service excellence and increased water efficiency.
The ‘Ready to Read’ project will harness the capabilities of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) natural language processing techniques to convert unstructured ‘free text’ data submitted by Meter Read Services. It will be converted into meaningful and actionable metrics that can be applied by non-household water suppliers to identify, prioritise, and resolve meter read and accessibility issues.
This addresses an industry-wide challenge of identifying, recording, and standardising the reasons why business water meters cannot be accessed by field teams. Solving this challenge will enable trading parties to prioritise and resolve meter-related issues more effectively – delivering a set of core metrics and statistics based on meter location, accessibility, read dates and values.
The project will provide significant benefits for end customers. It will enable meters to be accessed and read accurately, correct tariffs and charges, identify meters to be fixed, relocated, or replaced where applicable. The key objective of the solution is to reduce bill shock and customer complaints, improve customer experience and support a smoother billing and payment process.
It will also provide benefits to trading parties by enabling the prioritisation of customer addresses for meter related activities or campaigns. These can include meter relocations, smart meter installations, recertifications, site surveys, maintenance and more. ‘Ready to Read’ will help trading parties to maximise the value of their unused internal data to improve long unread meter (LUMs) performance, reduce expensive call out and unresolved field visit costs.
James Boswell, Head of Commercial Utilities, Clear Business Water, says:
“We see this as an incredibly exciting opportunity to work with Sagacity on behalf of the business water industry. By identifying opportunities to create data efficiencies through the combined use of innovation and our expertise, we look to bring impactful benefits to all.”
Anita Dougall, Sagacity CEO, says:
“We are delighted to have been awarded funding from MOSL’s Market Improvement Fund. Together with Clear Business Water, we wanted to make a step change and power the market from where it is today to an improved future to make a difference. We’ve seen the positive impacts of AI and Machine Learning across other clients and projects in the Water and Energy sectors, so are keen start working with meter read data to turn it into actionable insight. ‘Ready to Read’ phase one kicks off a significant project, but one that we know will benefit both the trading parties and their end customers, a win-win for everyone.”
