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Fighting
fraud and improving customer satisfaction at EMASA water supply company
Reliable and efficient water supply for Municipal Water company of Málaga (EMASA)
Fighting
fraud and improving customer satisfaction at EMASA water supply company
Reliable and efficient water supply for Municipal Water company of Málaga (EMASA)
Water
EMASA - Empresa Municipal Aguas de Málaga
Málaga Spain
Empresa Municipal de Aguas
de Málaga S.A. (EMASA),
the Municipal Water company of Málaga, is a water supply company in the region
of Málaga, proving water and services to ca. 600,000 people of the 5th largest
city in Spain. EMASA’s goals are to guarantee the sustainability of the water
service provided and, at the same time, to improve the level of customer
service.
Its aim was to implement smart
metering, in order to alert its customers immediately
about internal leaks and encourage responsible consumption of water.
EMASA required a ‘big data’ tool to
monitor and analyze large volumes of information from its water meters
of different meter types and with
various frequencies of reading.
The Tool needed to have the
capabilities to: Find
anomalies such as internal leaks in indoor installations, determine which meters should be
replaced, identify over- and undersized
meters, locate meters that were measuring
incorrectly, detect fraud & use technology to provide early
warning of incidents in social emergencies
SIWA Meter Data Analytics (MDA)
SIWA Meter Data Analytics was implemented in EMASA’s water network in Málaga. Data
from over 238,000 water meters was normalized and integrated into the database.
Currently,
54,400 of the 238,000 meters send daily data readings, including extended
information such as battery level, number of starts, sleep time, etc.
Thirty
parameters were incorporated into the data for each meter (battery level,
consumption, average flow, sleep/drip time, continuous consumption, absence of
consumption, etc.). These parameters provide the input data to generate alerts
in the event of a suspected anomaly or ‘suspicion’.
EMASA
has identified 64 different kinds of ‘suspicion’
(situations where meters display abnormal
behavior), grouped by types (meter
replacement, anomalous consumption, over-/under-sized meters, leaks, fraud,
administrative fraud, totalizer balance, social emergency).
Each
kind of ‘suspicion’ takes
into account at
least one, and potentially many, parameters and is calculated with reference to
a pre-determined formula. For example, an absence of consumption generates a social
emergency
‘suspicion’ if the inhabitant is a dependent person. In this scenario, family
or social services are immediately informed.
Fraudulent
behavior is another example which generates a ‘suspicion’. Many possible
scenarios can lead to a ’suspicion’ of fraud and if/when a potential
fraud is
identified, the utility can rapidly send a team to conduct an on-site
inspection, to confirm if the fraud exists and take quick corrective actions,
saving both water and money.
SIWA MDA has facilitated the
automatic detection of ‘suspicions’ by EMASA, resulting in a significant
reduction in the time spent by the utility’s team in analyzing data. The same
team now can do much more in less time.
The key benefits for EMASA
are:
Improved
data quality.
Simplification
of the process of detecting ‘suspicions’.
Increased
revenue, thanks to the early detection of fraud and stopped meters.