Raytown Water Company: Charting a course for the future with AMI

Raytown Water Company is a private water company that services the City of Raytown, Missouri. The water company was established in 1925 to provide water utility service to industrial, commercial and residential customers primarily in the City of Raytown and certain surrounding areas. A suburb of Kansas City, Raytown has a population of 30,000. Of this, Raytown Water Company serves approximately 6,700 connections, which translates into 13,000 people.

Raytown Water was formed after Dr. Samuel JT Davis, a medical doctor, saw the benefits of having city water brought to what was then a small farm town. He was able to assemble a group of investors who shared his belief, and soon the company started buying water from Kansas City. Today, Raytown Water Company still purchases all its water from Kansas City and acts as a wholesaler and distributor to its customers.

Raytown Water operates with a staff of 17 employees, 10 of whom are in the field. “We have a limited number of people in the office, who do everything. We wear many, many hats here,” says Chiki Thompson, vice president.

The transition from manual meter reading to AMI

Raytown Water, which had relied on a limited AMR program and manual meter reads for billing, decided to implement an AMI system about a year ago. “Until last year, we were manually reading all our meters, walking house to house, pulling up the meter lid, looking in the hole and using a handheld device to capture data and download it into the company’s computer,” said Thompson. “There’s an advantage in that you go to each house every month and can see the condition of the meter, determine if something is leaking, and see if someone is living there. But it’s very time consuming and labor intensive, and it’s very hard to find reliable people who want to do a physical job like that on a daily basis,” she added.

That problem became particularly evident with COVID, at a time when meters began to fail. “When some of our old meters needed to be replaced, we didn’t have enough people to switch them out. We couldn’t get enough help to even be a meter reader or help us fix water breaks because we do everything,” said Thompson.

That became the trigger point that influenced the decision to invest in an AMI system. “If we were going to have to change more than half the meters in our system, this would be the time to go ahead and make a major investment, to go ahead and bring ourselves up to the millennium with AMI,” she reflected.

While helping to alleviate the labor force issue, utilizing the power of AMI also helps relieve the possibility of human errors in reading the meters. This saves time, which in turn also saves the company and rate payers money, and importantly, enables Raytown Water’s technicians to tackle other things that need to be done in the field.

Another key benefit is that Raytown Water is able to see daily―even hourly―consumption for its customers. “Before AMI, the only way to do this was to stand there and watch a meter for an hour. Now, we can see that online on a dashboard in our office. So when a customer calls and says, ‘thanks for the heads up on the high leak. I think we fixed it, but can you tell if the consumption is going down,’ we can do that. It’s very helpful to the customer, helpful to us, and helpful in that we don’t have to issue a work order, send someone out, and incur another 24-48 hour delay,” Thompson noted.

Raytown Water elected to engage USG Water Solutions (USG), a company with which Raytown had a long history, noting that it was probably one of USG’s first clients that came on board when they started doing water tower maintenance.

“They have been wonderful for us. We have three water towers in our system, and I personally didn’t want to have to keep climbing the tower to inspect, paint or do anything else. USG said ‘this program will help you. We’ll help you keep in compliance with the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, Environmental Protection Agency and of course, the state of Missouri regulators, and you don’t have to climb the water tower, scrape and paint it. We will do all that and also wash it out, inspect and disinfect the inside of the towers.’ It is really a fantastic program,” Thompson recalls.

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What is cellular AMI?

Learn about AMI, a two-way communication system for detailed metering information in utility services.

The AMI system

USG Water Solutions’ ongoing AMI program consists of installing new smart meters, installing system software and software for the customer portal, managing ongoing system maintenance and upgrades, and more. The first phase was completed in early 2024.

Since ongoing monitoring and maintenance are critical aspects of the program, USG works with its Visio Center, a dedicated team that monitors the performance of all of Raytown’s meters. This helps ensure that Raytown achieves a 98.5 or greater percent read rate for every meter in the system. If the team sees that a meter has failed, it is flagged and monitored for five days. If it has not read after five days, USG issues a work order and its field crew goes out, troubleshoots and fixes the problem.

The benefits of AMI

“In terms of quantitative benefits, I'd say it’s a bit early to report on that, but I believe that the biggest impact is that we have been able to quickly catch leaks for customers on their behalf and save them a lot more money―faster than once a month,” said Thompson. “That’s because now, with AMI we get a report and can notify the customer right away if there is any anomaly. “

Another key benefit is that Raytown Water is able to see daily―even hourly―consumption for its customers. “Before AMI, the only way to do this was to stand there and watch a meter for an hour or two. Now, we can see that online on a dashboard in our office. So when a customer calls and says, ‘thanks for the heads up on the high leak; I think we fixed it, but can you tell if the consumption is going down,’ we can do that. It’s very helpful to the customer, helpful to us, and helpful in that we don’t have to issue a work order, send someone out, and incur another 24-48 hour delay,” Thompson noted.

“Before we implemented AMI, we wouldn't know that a customer had a leak until we went out and physically read their meter. Our team would bring the readings back to me every month; I would look at them, and if we saw a really high water bill, we’d alert the customer and find out what was happening. Unfortunately, that leak could have been going on for quite a while before it was spotted. All that has changed now.”

While helping to alleviate the labor force conundrum, utilizing the power of AMI also helps relieve the possibility of human errors in reading the meters. This saves time, which in turn also saves the company money, and importantly, enables Raytown Water’s technicians to tackle other things that need to be done in the field.

Thompson made one final point. “The customer service that we receive from USG Water Solutions helps us be better for our customers. One of our mottos is ‘providing safe and adequate drinking water since 1925’ and they help us maintain that goal.”