Skagerak Energi AS - “First Class AMI Pilot Results”

The Norwegian utility company Skagerak Energi AS managed a 96% hit rate on meter changes at first attempt during their pilot project for 5,000 household meters using Tieto’s AMI rollout planning, appointment scheduling and resource scheduling application.

How to book 5,000 appointments to change electricity meters inside people’s homes?
At the start of Skagerak's pilot project to install smart meters to customer households, a problem emerged: how to test new technology and a rollout process while controlling the customer interaction process all the way? More than 5,000 meters had to be replaced—and ultimately, all 178,000.

First attempt
The in-house solution Skagerak first tried proved inefficient in handling all the steps they wanted to test. There was also no easy way to keep the work team informed of changes. “When we had changed a few hundred meters we realised we would not be able to manage large workloads. So we started looking for a better solution,” says Kjell Brekke, controller at Skagerak Energi Customer Service.

From left: Ingunn Gåsodden Department Manager, Skagerak Fiber, Robert Schulstokk, Service Desk coordinator, Skagerak Energi, Kjell Brekke, Controller, Skagerak Energi.

Challenge

• In Norway almost all meters are inside customers’ homes.
• To ensure access to the meters, efficient customer communications was a must
• Skagerak  were faced with the problem of both testing out new technology and an efficient roll-out process

Solution

• Tieto’s AMI rollout solution enabled Skagerak to plan rollout areas in a structured way and provided a bird’s-eye view of the progress.
• The system allowed tweaking of customer communication both automatically and face-to-face. 
• The appointment scheduling and resource optimisation functionality gave all customers appointments they were satisfied with and provided flexibility for the field workforce.

Added value: 96% hit rate

• 96% of booked visits were carried out at the first attempt.
• More than 50% of the customers accepted the automatically suggested visit time.
• Setting up a pilot for an area of more than 5,000 meters only took between 1–2 hours of effective work.
• Workforce performance was pushed to less than 30 minutes per meter change.

Skagerak could focus on improving the customer interaction process while optimising resource and fleet usage, and now has the experience and the system needed to carry out efficient resource scheduling with appointment scheduling for a large scale roll-out.

Download leaflet (PDF, Eng)
Read more about Skagerak Energi (www.skagerakenergi.no)