The Challenge
Our client was on a transformation journey to digitally connect water and sewerage services to improve customer experience, reduce environmental impacts and optimize operating costs.
The Objective
- Build an intelligent data platform and reporting
- Ensure proper analysis of customer insights from both structured and unstructured data
- Find a solution to detect anomalies in water pressure and enable outage prediction
- Enable improved asset management and water loss
The Solution
As a part of the engagement:
- Our HCLTech 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 (hourly, weekday) and forecasted hourly water flow for the next seven days using Microsoft Power BI.
- The platform also converted phone conversation audio into text files, from which customer details were extracted using NLP. Extraction of customer details was enabled from Cognito forms and from live chats to identify outage locations, including details like longitude, altitude, etc.
- An AI/ML-based solution was used to minimize unplanned outages that resulted in revenue loss and skyrocketing maintenance costs. The solution analyzed water logger data and identified anomalies, low flow incidents and outage flags across channels like call centers and social media to confirm an outage and reduce false positives.
- Our team also created an intuitive dashboard for regional managers to provide real-time incident data with key metrics (e.g., average resolution time, area impacted, emergency activities, asset health status) which also provided early warnings about illegal pollution of the sewerage network.
The Impact
- 20% increase in energy savings due to less water being pumped at a lower average pressure
- Reduced bursts in water pipes by 40% and cut leaks by 20%
- Improved customer experience and enhanced sustainability maturity
