Project Summary
Customer
City of Concordia, MO
Type of Project
Metering Maintenance Program – including installation of a new AMI system and new meters – Aclara® AMI System with Sensus® water meters
Results
- Increased meter reading efficiency (100% reading)
- Increased revenue generated by more accurate readings and more efficient process
- Improved cash flow
- Improved customer service
- Increased availability of Utility staff resources for other activities
“Hearts in Harmony Since 1860” well describes the City of Concordia, MO. This small community is located between Kansas City and Columbia and offers a great place to live and a rural lifestyle to its 2360 residents. Concordia Lake supplies the surface water to the city.
Small communities often find it a challenge to have funds on hand for yearly maintenance and major capital expenditures without an emergency event taking place. Concordia was no different.
One of the major projects the City considered was replacing the aging meter population and a 15-year-old touch read system – which required a lot of labor-intensive maintenance – with a new Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) system that would allow them to bill directly from City Hall instead of using manpower and resources to go out, bring back, and process data for the City treasurer to issue water bills.
“To be able to cost-justify this type of expense in a small town is a very difficult procedure,” says Dale Klussman, City Administrator. However, the innovative metering services program from USG Water Solutions (USG), which allows the AMI infrastructure costs to be spread over many years, helped the City of Concordia successfully submit the project to the Board of Aldermen. After reviewing the specifics of the project, the Board agreed that the new AMI system would yield considerable benefits and pay for itself quickly.
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With its innovative Metering program, USG is providing a great service by bringing AMI to small communities that do not have the resources to install or maintain them.
— Dale Klussman, City Administrator, City of Concordia
More efficiency, increased revenue
Not only do the newly installed AMI system and meters spare the Utility staff the laborious task of manually reading and collecting data from thousands of meters, they also provide much more accurate data compared to the previous aging meters. The increased accuracy of the system has already allowed the Utility to capture significantly more revenue. The initial installation of the metering infrastructure was done by USG, allowing Utility staff to focus their attention on other important projects. All future maintenance of the automated system will also be performed by USG, which should further increase labor efficiencies. “In my opinion, the ability to tap more than four employees running a small community is a very powerful statement,” says Klussman.
Better Customer Service
The new AMI system provides near realtime usage data on all customers which allows the Utility to be more proactive, quickly alerting customers of potential water leaks for example. More accurate data also means fewer billing disputes and better customer service overall. “Our customer service has improved dramatically with the availability of hourly data on any given account at our fingertips, allowing us to communicate with our customers about any problem they are experiencing,” Klussman confirms.
