Liberty Lake, United States – Itron, Inc., a technology company that offers products and services for energy and water resource management, announced the launch of AMI Essentials in Australia and New Zealand to accelerate the digital transformation of water utilities. The end-to-end solution includes the new Itron Intelis wSource NB-IoT water metre and Temetra NB-IoT digital platform for advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).
As utilities in the region face growing water stress and aging utility infrastructure, AMI provides the foundation to mitigate the impact of these challenges. AMI Essentials eases the adoption of AMI with an end-to-end solution that brings together devices and a data platform with integrated analytics in an easy-to-deploy package that is tailored to the market. The solution establishes a foundation to deploy value-added use cases to address water losses, improve operations and enhance consumer engagement.
AMI Essentials for water is a flexible and open standards-based, end-to-end solution that provides a fully integrated software suite for data collection, metre data management and device management. Utilities can easily collect, track and manage data from multiple metering devices. The solution features Itron’s Temetra MDM platform to collect and manage data, enabling use cases, such as metre reading, work order management, asset management and water usage analytics. The end-to-end solution includes options for connectivity and other services to optimise planning, deployment and operations, and assess connectivity risks. This helps improve service quality and reliability.
Additional key benefits of the solution, include:
- Easy migration from manual metre reading to AMI. Maximises the business case, reduces pain points around AMI deployment, implementation and operations. One single platform for all metre data.
- Reduces risk of technology dependency. Open standards reduce the risk of standardising on one technology platform and provide interoperability with multiple communication service providers as well as integration within the IT infrastructure.
- Standard packaged solutions. Simplify adoption for smaller utilities and cities, including standard scope of services and use cases.
- Maximum validity. Durable metre components and battery designed to enable a 15-year lifetime even in harsh conditions.
“Across Australia and New Zealand, diverse and extremely challenging environmental conditions make it necessary to ensure that aging infrastructure maintains a long lifespan. Itron AMI Essentials for water will help utilities mitigate the impacts of climate disruption and address asset management and leakage challenges,” says Don Reeves, senior vice president of Outcomes at Itron. “Itron has a long history of supporting utilities in Australia and New Zealand, and we look forward to expanding our offerings with this end-to-end solution. Itron’s local support and knowledge coupled with our global expertise in water markets, AMI deployments and cellular communications will greatly benefit utilities in the region. We are excited to bring this comprehensive solution to help water utilities achieve their digital transformation goals.”
Solution details
Intelis NB-IoT Water Metre
Now available with Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) connectivity, the Intelis wSource water metre is engineered to maintain the high level of accuracy over its entire lifetime, connect easily to several data collection systems and generate data from the water network. It is the water metre available which is MID-certified up to R1000 accuracy, a new standard in precision for measuring water consumption at low-flows and increasing accuracy in customer billing. With low-to-no maintenance solid-state ultrasonic technology, the Intelis wSource metre maintains accuracy in harsh conditions and delivers long-lasting performance in the field lowering costs with fewer repairs and replacements. This allows water utilities to detect leaks and provide more accurate billing to customers, resulting in improved customer satisfaction as well as revenue protection with more accurate billing.
The Intelis wSource NB-IoT water metre features data connectivity options designed to ensure all metre data is made available to water operation centres. Intelis wSource NB IoT features AMR backup to protect data if the cellular network fails.
Temetra NB-IoT digital platform and Temetra Analysis
Itron’s Temetra NB-IoT data collection and data management system provides a platform for critical metre data management business processes. It currently supports over 30 customers and more than 2 million endpoints in Australia and New Zealand, and over 45 million worldwide. Temetra provides a platform for metering data unification, validation and dispatching to customer domain systems and addresses key processes such as long data storage, network monitoring and asset inventory and troubleshooting. It also provides out-of-the-box alarm management, including critical alarm management and operational analytics like abnormal consumption detection.
Temetra Analysis delivers measurable results that address non-revenue water (NRW) losses in the water distribution system. It improves operational visibility, minimises leaks, maximises return on investment on metre replacements, streamlines pressure management, reduces labour costs, optimises network operations and proactively improves the customer experience. These outcomes help utilities identify, prioritise and take action to reduce NRW for both real and apparent water losses in the distribution network.
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