NESCO Bangladesh taps smart meters with Oracle Utilities
The utility’s deployment of Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management is the first step in a full customer-to-meter transformation project.
“The richness and reliability of meter data from Oracle Meter Data Management has not only improved customer satisfaction and recovered costs, but also helped us accelerate our modernization plan by sidestepping the limitations and complexities we would have encountered with other vendors.”
Business challenges
Power utilities in Bangladesh predominately operate on outdated systems that provide limited visibility and control, resulting in frequent load shedding and outages. Limited visibility allows high rates of electricity theft to persist, creating revenue management challenges and limiting funds for further infrastructure upgrades and service expansion.
Additionally, many utilities in Bangladesh such as NESCO use prepaid billing, which often relies on costly and cumbersome prepay-specific metering. Prepay-specific meters require customers to purchase cards or tokens from service stations and manually type a PIN code to activate service. Leaders at NESCO Bangladesh, as well as the government, were convinced new technology could deliver a better approach, using smart meters.
While a lower-cost, hardware-specific meter system could have met NESCO’s immediate requirement to enable more frequent, reliable meter reads to detect losses and reduce outages, the utility sought a solution that could scale and flex across meter hardware types, without the need for additional customization in the future.
Why NESCO chose Oracle
When the government of Bangladesh invested in a 500,000 smart meter rollout for NESCO, it turned to local partner Oculin Tech BD and Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management to digitize prepay meter operations and create a single source of truth to improve grid efficiency, service reliability, and revenue management.
Oracle Utilities offered a comprehensive, extensible, and natively integrated capabilities that NESCO can use as needs evolve, including the ability to seamlessly switch from prepay to postpay using Oracle’s meter data management system. “Oracle Utilities has been essential to NESCO’s digital transformation,” says Mahbubul Alam Chowdhary, NESCO smart metering project director.
Results
With Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management in place, NESCO customers pay through a mobile app and automatically “top up” when needed using existing smart metering infrastructure. The Oracle Utilities system gathers consumption data from both analog and smart meters, aggregates consumption data, calculates billing determinants, and stores raw data and the results of all operations. It also makes it easier to provide new customer offerings and programs.
Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management collects, validates, and transmits consumption data in a timely manner to underpin reliable start and stop service. The flexible architecture of Oracle’s tool can fold new smart meters into the existing prepay workflow as they come online, regardless of the meter’s manufacturer.
Key benefits to NESCO include the ability to aggregate consumption data and billing determinants to streamline and digitize the billing process, recover revenue that can be used to expand services, improve grid efficiency, reduce load shedding and outages, improve customer service, reduce call center complaints, and increase agility to adapt to future needs.
Partners
Oculin Tech worked with NESCO Bangladesh to configure Oracle Meter Data Management with validation, edit, and estimate rules in line with the utility’s revenue protection targets. “With Oculin Tech’s local technology implementation experience and Oracle Utilities’ robust and configurable technology, NESCO has taken a giant leap into the future,” says K. Rumman Akhter, CTO of Oculin Tech.