MWM provides a Mobile App to register meter readings to Collins. Currently this is registered manually via a piece of paper.
In order to help improving COLLINS service to the customers, Mobile Water Management and COLLINS took a joint initiative to do a field survey. We followed the current manual reading procedure and compared it to the mobile app reading and tried to understand what the customer thinks about the introduction of automatic procedure of meter reading. The other goal of the survey is to determine the efficiency gains of the Mobile App (e.g. time, costs and mistakes).
The conclusion of the field survey is that the use of the Mobile App can potentially shorten the billing cashing cycle of the operator with 2 weeks, because the collected data is available straight after the readers sent the picture of the meter to the server, where the valid data can be imported via API to any billing software in real time.
The photo above illustrates a moment when readers from COLLINS in their reading rounds are using both ways Manual meter reading and Mobile App on the phone by taking picture of the meter to be used for the billing cashing cycle.