Digitalising water management with IoT: Iguá Saneamento and WND Brasil partner to deploy 120,000 smart water meters connected to the 0G Network
Challenges
Serving over six and a half million Brazilian customers in urban areas with water collection, sewerage treatment, drinking water supply, disposal, and water purification services, Iguá Saneamento needed an efficient, reliable solution to read water meters better, detect leaks and non-revenue water, and improve customer services.
Solution
Iguá partnered with WND Brasil to digitalise water meter reading with an IoT-enabled solution connected to the 0G Network that remotely monitors water usage and flows across its distribution network 24×7.
Results
The efficiency and accuracy of its smart water meter solution enabled Iguá to:
- Strengthen customer service with better billing and consumption visibility
- Rapidly identify fraud, leaks, and non-revenue water situations
- Improve non-payment controls
- Boost revenues by up to 10%.
- Develop new value-added services
0G IoT Solution Provider
WND Brasil is part of an operator network that pioneered the construction and operation of the global 0G Network, powered by Sigfox technology, to provide low-power, cost-effective IoT connectivity across LATAM & the UK.
Solution Partner
Leading end-to-end AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) solution provider, KAIFA offers a broad range of cost competitive metering solutions for utility business digitalization, with over 84 million on-site smart devices serving more than 80 utilities in 40 countries.
Customer
Established in 2017, Iguá is committed to becoming the best sanitation company for Brazil and helping the country achieve universal access to water and sewage services, with services available in 39 municipalities in six states.
Brazil is a nation of water contradictions. The country has the planet’s highest volume of renewable freshwater resources, between 12 and 14 percent, yet its water distribution networks experience daily challenges. Non-revenue water, that is, water processed for human use but “lost” before it reaches the customer, is an issue for every local water utility. Water fraud rates are high, and delayed visibility of water consumption through manual meter readings interrupts customer efforts to save water and money on bills.
Iguá Saneamento, a private owner and operator of a water distribution network with over 500,000 connection services, has ambitions to address these challenges through a water management digitalisation strategy built to achieve four guiding principles:
- Water security
- Efficiency of water lifecycle management
- Responsibility for sewerage collection and treatment
- Customer respect
A strategic step for the Iguá team to realise its digitalisation ambitions was analysing solutions capable of regularly capturing and sharing data on water consumption, flow, and management to drive better decision-making. Traditional smart water meters enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT) offered compelling business value, but high networking and device costs challenged the viability of the business case for deployments at scale.
Iguá needed to partner with an organisation able to deliver a robust, profitable solution backed by a mature ecosystem of software, hardware, services, and support for tens of thousands of smart water meter installations.
A turning point of Iguá’s smart water metering business case viability
In 2020, Iguá engaged solution provider WND Brasil, to deliver a small water pressure gauge monitoring, using smart water meters connected to WND Brasil’s 0G Network, powered by Sigfox technology. The 0G Network is a global low-power, long-range network enabling low-cost, low-energy device connectivity for massive IoT deployments.
The outstanding pilot results demonstrated the 0G Network’s reliable connectivity, high measurement quality, consistent performance, and fair price for infrastructure.
The results were all the evidence the Iguá board needed to approve including a smart water meter solution in the company’s digitalisation strategy.
In late 2021, Iguá contracted WND Brasil to deploy and connect up to 120,000 smart water meters across Brazil.
We went from one consumption data per month per customer to hundreds of data points (daily consumption, alarms, equipment status, etc.). The part that generates the most value – which is transforming all the data that is coming from the field into insight – is continuous and will sustain the whole project. At Iguá, we take the digitalization of water and the creation of a data-driven culture very seriously – we know the importance of analyzing data well to extract value from it. To us, data is like raw water: we need to treat it to be able to consume it.Murillo Borges, Director of Operations Iguá Saneamento
The business value unlocked by smart water metering solution for Iguá and its customers.
To date, WND Brasil has installed 20,000 water meters for Iguá, with more deployments happening daily. The project requires replacing some old mechanical meters with new ultrasonic smart meters and retrofitting smart meters to digitalise older mechanical meters at homes and offices across Brazil.
The smart water meters periodically collect water usage data and automatically transmit that information to Iguá’s master data management solution over the 0G Network twice daily. Each transmission includes multiple meter reading messages. The solution also includes a mechanism to recover lost readings via a downlink command, that can cover multiple days, if necessary. The master data management solution incorporates data from other Iguá data stores with the smart meter data to create a holistic customer view accessible by Iguá’s accounts, operations, sales, marketing, and field teams.
Iguá’s game changing smart water metering solution helps us rapidly pinpoint possible leaks and proactively alert customers via Digi Iguá if a problem or outage is likely to occur. Accurate, readily available water usage data lets us help customers better manage consumption, improve our billing accuracy, and enhance ESG reporting. The company has achieved up to ten percent savings through managing what type of meter is best to monitor customer use, fraud, and non-payment challenges.
Our client relationships have significantly improved since introducing the smart water meter solution as it allows customers access to daily consumption data and potential leakages via Digi Iguá. By applying algorithms on IoT data and using machine learning technology to search for outliers, our field teams can rapidly identify and address problems like water fraud and non-revenue water.Ricardo Tozetti, IoT Technical Coordinator at Iguá Saneamento
Although Iguá’s smart water meter project is just 20 percent complete, the business value for the company and its customers has been quick and remarkable, including:
- Enhanced consumption visibility & accurate billing
- Quick, proactive identification of fraud, leaks, and non-revenue water situations
- Cost savings of up to ten percent
- Insights to develop new value-added services
- A single view of accounts which streamlines services offered and the customer experience
Taking Advanced Metering Infrastructure(“AMI”) as an investment gain in non-revenue water (“NRW”) represents long-term benefits beyond one-way reading data collection, and Iguá proved it with foresight and practices. The solution chosen by Iguá, working efficiently and smoothly on site with 0G network powered by Sigfox technology, daily keeps delivering reliable and accurate data flows enabling timely involvement of NRW management and long-term operation optimization.Xin Chen, Regional Sales Director (Americas) of KAIFA
In some areas of the water management industry, data-driven decision-making is relatively new. However, IoT technology’s increasing maturity, scalability, affordability, and availability is changing that. In Brazil, Igua is proving that low-power, high-performance smart water meters connected to the 0G Network, converge technology and sustainability to empower communities, conserve a valuable resource, and build a brighter, water-wise future.Jose Almeida, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of WND Brasil
The partnership between Igua Saneamento and WND Brasil has delivered over 20,000 remotely read smart water meters connected to the 0G Network by UnaBiz, with 100,000 more meters due for installation by the end of 2024. This powerful success story highlights the commercial, customer, and ESG benefits of using the low-power, long-range, and simplicity of the 0G Network to cost-effectively enable digitalisation strategies for utilities organisations.Loic Barancourt, Chief Commercial Officer of UnaBiz