Mastering sustainability challenges in the water domain with smart meter synergy

If you watched DUNE or read the book, then you’ll get my drift: waste not, want not. This story is about three water utilities that worked together, like the fictional Fremen of the desert-planet Arakkis, to build a synergistic system to manage water usage across their entire water sector sustainably and much more efficiently. 

Farys is a water utility that provides cities and municipalities in Belgium with public domain services and infrastructure management—from the distribution and transport of drinking water to water sanitation to sports facilities and swimming pools. This is a complex operation, given all the economic, political, social, and environmental systems that consume or use water or have a say in its management or influence its abundance.

In the water sector, utilities are dealing with challenges related to sustainability, along with soaring levels of non-revenue water, unreliable supply, low groundwater flows, supply infrastructure issues, drought, and regulatory pressure for synergy across the sector. This legislative push for smarter meters, high operating costs, lack of market standardization, and the absence of a standard operating model led to the three biggest water utilities in Flanders (De Watergroep, Farys, and Pidpa) to initiate a sector collaboration and co-innovation on the existing platform of Farys.  

“A water sector topic with so much social relevance deserves an eminent collaboration and state-of-the-art technology platform,” said Inge Opreel, CIO of Farys. As a result, the three Belgian water utilities joined forces to define a collaborative, integrated solution to their complex problems.

20% cost reduction potential due to more efficient business operations

First, the three utilities set up a common business model. It would be supported by a cloud-based, future-proof smart meter and energy management system combined with a synergistic, mass roll-out of smart digital water meters. The smart meter program fits into the water utilities’ broader vision to digitalize water networks to face current sustainability challenges across the water sector. 

The utilities then worked with Capgemini and SAP to define a solution that would combine proven technology with an innovative approach. The result of the collaboration was a fully integrated, cloud-based, smart meter and energy management system, that Farys named, “The Smart Water Platform,” built on the flexible, open architecture of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and SAP Cloud for Energy. 

“With the Smart Water Platform, everything is integrated,” explained Opreel. “Our data is in one place. It unlocks intelligence, simplifies innovation, and lowers our total cost of ownership compared to our peers.”

To illustrate, Farys expects a 20% cost reduction potential due to increased efficiency in administration and business operations as a result of integration between all components, one source of truth, and extensive analytics, with the ability to unlock artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The first AI use cases are implemented in the moment to retrieve further insights from the accumulated data, including clustering based on water usage patterns, forecasting water consumption, and implementing predictive maintenance strategies.

2.7 million digital meters to roll out and maintain on the Smart Water Platform

The collaboration between Farys, De Watergroep, and Pidpa has delivered a common operating model to the water sector in Belgium, supported by a cloud-based, digital meter-independent platform. The Smart Water Platform handles many functional areas for Farys—from monitoring and validating meter readings to handling events and alerts to data visualization, integration, and provisioning to increased consumer awareness. 

More than 2.7 million digital water meters will be rolled out by 2030 and maintained by the Smart Water Platform. The solution allows the company to implement a business data fabric architecture and delivers self-service analytics features, allowing more users to access authoritative data. It is also meter-independent and supports integration with external systems and data providers. For example, the Smart Meter Platformintegrates with everything—including different head-end systems that collect measurement data and meter events, SCADA and Lab Information Systems, and with the infrastructure of Data as a Service (DaaS) providers for data generation, transmission, and analytics services. 

The water utilities’ collaboration also created a sector-wide Smart Water Meter Program based on the unified and collaborative IT platform. The program enables joint tendering for market standardization, better terms, knowledge sharing, and collaborative projects to lower TCO. By collaborating and through economics of scale, there is on average a 20% cost reduction achieved. For instance, now there is a sector-wide Meter Operation Center and ICT Service Center, and new and improved customer services enabled by the platform. 

For example, meter readings are captured automatically, and billing is based on real-time data. In addition, consumers have near real-time visibility to monitor their water usage and anomalies through a customer portal. In-house leak detection and notification have been increased from once per year to every 24 hours. And yearly invoice lead time has been reduced from weeks to just one day.

Sustaining a precious resource with water sector synergy and smart technology 

Smart metering technology has revolutionized water management. It promotes sustainable water usage practices and helps conserve precious resources. By providing accurate, real-time data on water usage with their new smart meter and water management system, Farys, De Watergroup, and Pidpa can promote water conservation, reduce water waste, and improve billing accuracy across the water sector. 

Science-fiction writers like Frank Herbert of Dune (published 1965) often imagine the future in terms of solutions that are not so different from what we experience today. Whether an ecosystem for natural resource preservation or personal “communicators” that each of us carries to stay connected—it is the synergy between science and humanity that makes it work.

Farys received an 2024 SAP Innovation Award as a Transformation Titan for sustainability in the transportation and utilities sector. See the pitch deck to learn about the system architecture and deployment of the Smart Water Platform. For post-implementation details, read the case study.