Personnel deployed daily from regional offices throughout the country to several gas metering stations to collect data printouts.
Sometimes no printout to collect due to printer failure and personnel will then have to stay longer to manually execute a print.
When failure happens to important equipment i.e. analyzers or sensors, data is lost.
When data loss occurs, manual correction is performed to produce the corrected billing report. This is time-consuming and subject to human error. This effort continue until the initial cause of data loss is rectified, adding to the total cost and time expenditure.
Management have no visual on type, regularity and location of equipment failures.
Challenges Faced
Different types of equipment at each station, thus requiring different communication protocols and data sources
Determining lost data that require backfilling and selection of data to backfill the lost data
Determining lost data that require backfilling and selection of data to backfill the lost data
Our Solution
Custody Transfer Billing Information Management System
We installed webConcept Edge Server at each region (total of 7 regions). System was customized to remotely retrieve billing information from each station’s data concentrator (i.e. PLC, Flow Computers, Gas Analyzers data)
The system performs data backfilling whenever there is missing data due to device failure (by polling archive data).
The system performs automatic billing correction for incorrect data based on user specified criteria.
We performed address standardization at local data concentrator for all stations (100+ stations).
Sources of human error (i.e. manual correction) removed. Uncontested billing ensures timely payment.
Cost and time savings to customer from reduced travel and manual correction.
Paperless transaction for the entire process.
Business information (i.e. regional data & statistics, asset maintenance, every station data nationwide like analyzer data, billing data, etc) now available to an executive’s fingertips.
A gateway to deliver important data to customer’s centralized Gas Management System.
