As your utility has added customers over the years, you've probably looked for ways to gather meter data more efficiently. If you distribute multiple products - electricity, water, natural gas - or serve a diverse service area, you may have installed multiple types of meter reading solutions. Today your utility may have tens or even hundreds of thousands or millions of meters from multiple manufacturers generating data that's gathered in multiple ways. Your large investment in gathering meter data has helped your billing department keep pace with change and growth, but now other groups within your utility are asking for more data. Or, perhaps you are looking for ways to share the operational costs of deploying AMR across the multiple groups that can all gain some advantage with this data. Ideally, you need one simple way to collate and analyze all your meter data for forecasting, planning, energy delivery, maintenance, and more to help keep your system reliable, profitable, and competitive. Properly managed meter data enables utilities to predict system load and usage to avoid imbalances and reduce off-network purchases. Data analysis can help pinpoint over- or under-utilized infrastructure, improve system throughput, speed service restoration after outages, and more. Properly managed data means your utility can deliver more value to customers and shareholders for less overall cost. Data itself becomes an asset. Although this may sound like technology from a hi-tech future, meter data management really just supports the basic and sound operation of energy delivery. It enables operational efficiency, cost reduction, and meeting current and future goals with fewer resources. Meter data helps utility leaders make good decisions, deploy new supporting technologies and get the most return out of their existing base of assets. This paper will discuss strategies for implementing a centralized meter data management system, how such a system interacts with multiple metering technologies and data applications, and the benefits that meter data management can supply to employees, customers, and shareholders.
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