South East Water successfully scales its digital utility with the Lentic® platform
Staged deployment of 1 million digital devices managed through Lentic® drives water savings, customer experience and sustainable practices.
Customers and Challenges
South East Water, similar to many other water utilities, operates in an increasingly complex landscape: Climate change, a growing population, ageing networks, and heightened customer expectations are competing for attention and resources. All this while the utility works to maintain affordability for customers.
South East Water, one of Australia’s largest water organisations delivers water and wastewater services to over 1.8 million people in Melbourne’s southeast region and manages over 27,000 km of pipeline. They supply 142 billion litres of drinking water and collect and treat more than 136 billion litres of wastewater each year. To work through challenges on multiple fronts, South East Water recognized the need to manage a digital transformation journey from vision to scale, with a dedicated digital utility division.
“Our customers expect digital offerings because they get them through other services…”
“It’s giving us granularity that we’ve never had before. It’s literally down to the pipe connecting into house and through to the main pipes in the street. We can detect leaks effectively in near real-time, long before they become a burst or a disruption to the customer.”
Andrew Foster Knight
Acting General Manager - Service Delivery, South East Water
Solution
In 2021 South East Water deployed one of Australia’s largest digital water meter rollouts. It leveraged the Lentic® IoT platform to initially connect 30,000+ digital water meters. Through Lentic®, each digital meter was managed through water-specific rules and alarms.
South East Water’s digital transformation progressed from trial to a scaled IoT network. It enabled operations to manage unprecedented volumes of data in near real-time. The alignment of people, processes, and technologies, reinforced by a data-driven approach were key to the program’s success.
Lentic’s® rules engine, computer edge technology and data validation processes underpinned the successful management of thousands of devices at scale. They provided seamless streaming of accurate high-quality data in near real-time to customer billings. On the wastewater side, South East Water introduced a ‘Smart Sewer’ program featuring 2000 leakage monitoring devices to identify potential blockages or spills.
RESULTS
Data from the rollout of over 92,000 digital meters
South East Water transitioned from pilot to scale. The utility is realising next-level customer experience supported by material customer benefits. On the operations side, the utility is facing improvements in network intelligence, water efficiency and resilience.
The results achieved to date are:
- Digital meter data is supporting customers’ ability to save water
- South East Water has so far notified over 16% of their customer base of customer-side water leaks
- From a sustainability perspective, over 1.3GL of precious water has been saved
- Financially, customers have saved an average of $346 off their next bill
- South East Water’s customer base collectively have saved over $5.5 million by detecting and fixing leaks that may have gone unnoticed early
