Real-time business intelligence solutions are expected to be game changers for asset-intensive and field-force-driven enterprises, such as utilities. These solutions have become pervasive for enterprises to find value that had been “unseen” in the data before.
Utilities deal with an enormous amount and increasingly diverse set of data coming in from various sources. However, somewhere in this data deluge lays the path to a more efficient tomorrow. Data analytics gives them the power of insights to uncover significant events and identify trends in order to adapt quickly to ever-changing business dynamics.
From electricity distribution to demand response, water supply management to collecting meter readings, oil transmission to delivery, utility enterprises need flexible business processes to adopt intelligent capabilities in order to deliver vital services to their customers. Delivering the right information to the right people in the right format and at the right time is the significant aspect of real-time business intelligence (BI). It is the process of delivering information about business operations as they occur with minimum latency. Business intelligence solutions can help utilities make better decisions, support automation processes and help customers manage their utility lifestyles. This in turn can help optimize business decisions, improve operations and increase customer satisfaction.
Here is a breakdown of the five most obvious benefits of real-time business intelligence for utilities:
Identifying potential problems in field assets, grids and wells, utility distribution equipment can help avoid unplanned service interruptions in advance. Also, any delay in responding to an equipment’s failure and maintenance issues can lead to operational inefficiency. This inefficiency can be regulated by monitoring the performance and health of assets to predict decay points or equipment failure. Hence, analyzing real-time machine data or operational data can help solve these challenges. Real-time insights into asset health, peak periods, supply and demand analysis, and abnormal conditions can help improve asset performance.
Data analytics-driven business intelligence solutions that provide analyses via rich visuals and statistics are what utilities need to adopt. The capabilities provided by BI systems can help enhance the reliability, capacity and availability of the assets, which in turn improves asset performance. This can help ensure smoother operations at peak periods, eliminating downtime occurrence. It also allows them to trigger maintenance schedule operations at regular intervals to receive notifications on asset health.
Intelligence from IoT assets, smart grids and SCADA enriched with customer data can provide critical insights into a customer’s utility usage. Utilities can build systems of intelligence around the consumption pattern to empower consumers with usage insights and influence their usage behavior. Segmentation at a micro level to develop a 360-degree view of customer’s usage behavior can help bring the best possible ways to optimize their usage. Utilities can thus provide cost-effective plans delivering personalized experience, thereby improving loyalty, customer lifetime value and reducing customer churn. They can now provide customers with self-service intelligence capabilities to view and manage their utility usage, consumption pattern, historical usage, billing, payment and abnormal usage conditions.
