Wheatley Associates and C&C Group collaborate on UK's Smart Metering roll-out
04 Jan, 2012
Bacton (Suffolk), UK– 4th January 2012. Wheatley Associates and C&C Group, two of the leading software and services solutions providers to the UK utilities industry, have announced a strategic collaboration to support the UK utilities industry’s largest logistical challenge to date - the forthcoming Smart Meter installation programme. The collaboration draws extensively on both Wheatley Associates and C&C Group’s wide-ranging knowledge and experience of the UK utilities industry built up over the past 25 years to target the joint development and marketing of a range of software solutions designed to help meter installation companies manage and implement the smart meter roll-out efficiently and cost-effectively.
The first, key deliverable of the Wheatley/C&C collaboration is the Smart Roll-out Optimiser, a software solution designed to underpin the strategic planning and maximise the implementation efficiency of the smart meter installation process, at the same time as ensuring maximum quality of service (QoS) levels to customers. The Smart Roll-out Optimiser provides a front-end to any workforce management system including Wheatley Associates’ ASSIGN metering-specific solution.
“With over 50 million meters to be changed, the sheer size and scale of the smart metering challenge is unprecedented. What, on the face of it, might seem a relatively straightforward exercise is actually a highly complex process that demands a new generation of support software to help plan and implement it,” said Jeremy Goulding, CEO of Wheatley Associates. “It is a challenge that calls for some imaginative collaborations between specialist solutions providers to the utilities industry. Our partnership with C&C Group will leverage our combined expertise to deliver the solutions needed by installation companies to effectively strategise and efficiently manage the whole smart meter installation process.”
The Smart Roll-out Optimiser focuses on the critical areas of installation planning, customer engagement and workforce utilisation. It enables companies to model hypothetical installation schedules as the basis for optimising smart meter installation plans, ensures customer engagement/contact centres are able to support the selected strategy by maximising confirmed appointments, and provides real-time feedback of actual performance against plan, allowing timely intervention to daily work schedules and the refinement of ongoing activity.
“Effective engagement with customers and the efficient deployment of installation staff will be critical to the success of the UK smart meter installation programme,” said Steve Kinder, Managing Director of C&C Group. “Not even the prospect of a smart meter will have home owners waiting in for the meter man. Given the extraordinary volume of meters to be installed, new tools like the Smart Roll-out Optimiser will be essential in helping to meet predicted installation targets and constraining costs within desirable limits.”
The Smart Roll-out Optimiser adopts a three-stage approach to the meter installation process aimed at enabling metering companies achieve the optimum installation schedule based on the maximum possible number of confirmed appointments with prioritised customer groups or regions as appropriate. The process starts with the Campaign Planner which allows installation scenarios to be built to provide an accurate forecast of how a particular smart metering campaign might develop in practice. These scenarios are based on a mix of factors such as individual installer skills, operating hours, available workers, numbers of confirmed and assumed appointments. Once an optimum campaign is defined, the Customer Interface presents the customer contact team with the information to drive the appointment booking and confirmation process, allowing the escalation and targeting of contact effort as the campaign date approaches or operational efficiency requires intervention. The Operations Interface monitors confirmed appointments against available resource as well as resource utilisation allowing “’what if’ studies to be undertaken so that campaigns can be optimised from an operational perspective. Finally, as work is completed actual activity can be compared to planned performance to identify and rectify any issues.
“As organisations finalise their plans for smart metering, those tasked with delivering the roll-out will be wrestling with how to reconcile the demands for increased customer engagement against the challenge of controlling the cost to deliver. The Smart Roll-out Optimiser draws on the wealth of our combined expertise in meter installation and management to provide them with the tools to deliver on both counts,” concludes Jeremy Goulding.
