Ferguson Waterworks Meter and Automation Group is a dedicated team of Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) specialists. We create turnkey water meter solutions for municipalities and rural water systems to stop the loss of revenue and increase metering accuracy and efficiency.
Municipal water departments and rural water systems are confronted with many infrastructure challenges:
- Aging infrastructure: As a manual-read metering infrastructure nears the end of its useful life, reading accuracy steadily declines.
- Limited meter reading resources: Full-time employees are required to read meters over the course of several days. Illness and weather affect their ability to complete reads safely and on-time. Municipalities and rural water systems also find themselves dealing with a high turnover for meter readers.
- Vehicle and fuel costs: The cost to maintain and fuel the vehicles used to read meters continues to rise.
- Lost revenue: Non-revenue water is an issue for water utilities around the country. Not only does this affect their bottom line but also there are often state laws requiring water suppliers to maintain distribution system leakage below a certain threshold.
- Growing demand for better technology: As technology advances, end-users are expecting more from their utility service providers, such as real-time data and improved customer support.
AMI systems provide the ability to monitor for potential customer leaks daily, and many can also detect leaks within the distribution system early when proactive repairs can be made before a bigger emergency occurs. Additionally, in combination with asset management systems and predictive analytics programs, today’s AMI systems allow for cost-effective management of the entire water system infrastructure. Intelligent metering systems and cloud-based analytics software programs provide unprecedented access to real-time information about consumption, demand and system efficiency, which allows forward-thinking utilities to apply predictive programs and correct problems before they occur.
AMI systems with robust and expandable platforms provide real-time data on a community’s water resource, giving consumers easy-to-understand information that allows them to proactively monitor and address their water usage. Customer service improvements allow the utility’s customer service representatives ready access to real-time and historical views of a consumer’s water usage, enabling them to identify things like continuous consumption (possible leaks), reverse flow and hourly consumption data, which can be shared with the consumer in a positive and meaningful dialog. These customer service improvements create a positive partnership with the consumer, and reduces the need for unnecessary truck rolls to a customer’s meter, which saves money for the utility.
Customized Services and Solutions
Ferguson Waterworks distributes and installs the most modern metering technology available, and has access to the top metering brands in the industry with the ability to create a customized water meter management solution to address our customers’ unique needs. Services include: metering sales; system audit and design; experienced installation labor and project monitoring; complete project management, from the first install to the last; a proprietary data collection system allowing for accurate transfer of information from old meters to the new ones; in-house support team; after-the-sale service and repair; customized maintenance program; and access to Ferguson’s proprietary installation and project management software.
Ferguson Waterworks offers a reliable coast-to-coast network of 200 locations and 2,100 highly trained associates. For more information, visit www.Ferguson.com/waterworks.
