Dutch Water Dips into Big Data Pool

Dutch water company Brabant Water wants to use data to improve the service it provides to customers, as well as identify problems on its distribution network

Brabant Water has been working with smart meters for large business customers for several years, but households in its service area are not yet fully equipped with smart meters.

Meter readers are fitted with equipment that allows them to be read remotely, and Brabant Water produces large amounts of data with one million meters in use. The data gained from these is mainly used for billing – but this is set to change.

Frank van der Putten, meter management manager at Brabant Water, said there is enormous potential in the data that the company is yet to take advantage of.

“We are still searching. We would like to combine the data from our systems, sensors and meters with other data, so we can trace possible leaks more quickly and better manage water consumption,” said Van der Putten.

The drinking water company has three operations – production, distribution and customer contact. Van der Putten and colleague Johan van Erp, advisor to the meter department, are closely involved in customer services and see the value of all the data collected.

“Across the breadth of our business, from water collection to delivery to the customer, we can insert measuring points. Combining all the information that comes out of it can yield a lot of data,” said Van der Putten.

“When a customer calls with a complaint about water pressure, you can put it next to your measurements from the network and detect the cause quickly.”

This will assist the company’s customer services and enable it to solve customer problems faster, which will improve customer satisfaction and make the companies resources more efficient.

By combining data from a million smart meters, customer services will take less time identifying a problem and will cut down the time taken from reporting to fixing.

There are almost 2.5 million people with 1.1 million connections in the area covered by Brabant Water. The drinking water company supplies approximately 177 million cubic meters of water every year, of which 165 million is delivered to residents, businesses and institutions, with the rest supplied to other water companies.

It employs more than 750 full-time employees, and the company achieved a turnover from water of more than €165m in 2015.

Van Erp and Van der Putten are drawing up research questions that can be answered using data from the organisation. Van Erp said the ultimate information for the organisation is data that tells it when a conveying pipe is likely to break.

“This is almost impossible to predict, but we can approach it with the right questions. As we become more willing and able to measure and combine data, we can generate knowledge.”

The challenge remains to make all those terabytes of data manageable. To this end, Brabant Water teamed up with consultancy firm Nelen & Schuurmans and research institute KWR. Together, the organisations are working out how the data – which Brabant Water has collected in recent years – can be used to generate knowledge.

“We need to look at the connection between complaints received in our customer contact centre and – for example – the pressure generated at one of our stations. We want to create algorithms that can then work with real-time data to detect things early.”

Source: Computer Weekly

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