Driving water stewardship with IoT

Energy Monitoring — Public Utility Services

Case Study

Public Sector

PiServe helps a Middle Eastern sovereign to gain water resilience, delivering an IoT solution to track consumption and minimize leakages

About the client

The client is a government department responsible for monitoring and managing the nation’s water resources, project planning and execution, and formulating its water policies. Its scope also includes maintaining the centralized water-related statistics. Transformation of the country’s water delivery infrastructure and consumer behavior is one of the key focus areas for the establishment

Abstract

Alongside climate change, acute water stress is emerging as a crisis in the Middle East and worldwide. Therefore, optimizing demand-side aspects in the country’s water value chain is one of the client’s strategic priorities. It decided to embrace technology to combat the persisting problems of water theft and leakages that equally deprive the end consumers and the government through revenue loss. For implementing this vision, the client was looking for an adept technology partner to develop smart sensors that can continuously monitor water supplies for leakages and provide insights.

Business challenges

As the authority in a typical desert nation, in addition to ensuring last-mile delivery of water, its stewardship has consistently featured high on the client’s agenda. Intuitive detection of leakages along the water delivery infrastructure and impactful loss management has been emerging as a necessity to sustain the country’s growing population and its thriving economy.

Furthermore, regardless of the human consequences, the revenue implications of failing to plug the gaps have been particularly daunting. A recent inquiry revealed that losses due to theft, metering inaccuracies, and supply chain leakages could surge as high as 25%. The situation led the client to confront the following plausible questions:

How can the water providers and supply chain partners nationwide be enabled to maintain a real-time oversight on key water delivery variables like pressure, flows, and quality?
How can the actual water flow during various day phases be analyzed and correlated with ideal consumption patterns to detect anomalies and leakages?

Our approach

The PiServe consultants thoroughly assessed the client’s requirements. The team was convinced that only an IoT intervention could deliver the runtime insights the client desired. Accordingly, it collaborated with various stakeholders and developed an IoT-enabled leak detection solution, unlike any other available in the market. Some features that made it stand out include:

RF communication capabilities with an extensive wireless range, allowing the device to communicate seamlessly with the cloud, other IoT devices, and infrastructure
Extended battery life avoiding the hassle of periodic maintenance and associated costs
High portability and easy installation allow all water providers and supply chain partners to adopt it effortlessly
Compatibility with multiple sensor types for collecting a broad range of data points
A mobile app that runs across devices to deliver core insights like ambient temperature, humidity, and leakages. Further responders can be notified through multiple channels in case of incidents
Predictive maintenance capabilities for preempting complete service outages

IoT solutions and smart sensors for better control over water delivery infrastructure to manage the loss of precious water resources to theft and leakages.

The result

The impact of the solution developed by PiServe has been nothing short of revolutionary, allowing the client to take the fight against water wastage closer to the ground. The attributes of the solution were designed to be realistic, and they delivered accordingly with predictable outcomes like:

An assured collection of revenue that was earlier lost due to theft, metering inaccuracies, and supply chain leakages

More realistic national water strategies backed by the wide variety of data points collected through the solution.

An near-universal adoption of the device amongst the water providers and supply chain partners nationwide due to the high portability and easy installation of the device

A smooth transformation of the nation’s legacy water delivery systems into smart infrastructure due to long battery life, predictive maintenance, and automated software updates for the device

A easy pinpointing of leakages and rapid adoption of countermeasure due to the availability of all the necessary information on the handheld devices of the responders and engineers