Preparing for winter storms isn’t something that can be done last minute. Winter storms put stress on utility infrastructure and teams, whether it's water, wastewater, stormwater, electric, or natural gas. While utilities everywhere are working diligently to upgrade and maintain their infrastructure, that is a long-term game.
Smart infrastructure, such as advanced meter infrastructure(AMI) is one of the ways many utilities are building resilience into their assets. For both electric and water utilities, AMI helps identify anomalies and identify impacted areas.
However, AMI isn’t in place everywhere. Where it has been implemented, data can be overwhelming or incomplete. Where it hasn’t been implemented, it can take years and significant investment to build.
Response management systems (RMS) add resilience to a utility’s infrastructure, whether or not they have AMI. An RMS can be implemented quickly, at a fraction of the cost, and it provides immediate benefits that improve resilience during winter storms, or any other extreme weather event.
A few benefits:
- An RMS can combine sensor data with customer data, or use customer data entirely, to identify critical failures. This effectively lets you use your customers as a built-in set of sensors.
- Photos submitted by customers provide precise incident detail, including location information.
- AI that analyzes and groups customer reports and sensor data, plus photos and notes submitted by customers, help prioritize where to focus first when a storm generates multiple issues simultaneously.
- RMS tools, such as automated callout and notifications, further empower utilities to act on incident data, fast.
- Communications and engagement tools keep customers informed along the way.
- An RMS with answering services can even handle overflow calls when call volumes overwhelm your customer service teams.
"...Even before the storm, believe it or not, people call - 'Hey, am I going to lose power?' With customer engagement with Daupler, it allows them to receive the most current and up-to-date information from our boots on the ground." - Kevin Howard, Berea Municipal Utilities
An RMS accelerates incident response by 50% on average. Over 90% of utility customers opt in to customer engagement tools, saving the utility hundreds to thousands of calls. A little more resilience like that can make a huge impact amid the chaos of storm season.