Today DC Water’s Assistant General Manager for Consumer Services, Charles Kiely, was presented with the Ed Malemezian Utility Professional Best Practices Award by Utilimetrics. The award recognized Kiely’s work leading the development of applications that collect AMR (automated meter reading) data and record daily usage, analyze trends and perform automatic notifications if water usage spikes considerably.

“There is a great team at DC Water that has made these advances possible, from Customer Service to IT,” said Kiely. “They all share in this award with me.”

He added, “The AMR program has been a terrific success. Since we adopted the fixed network AMR system, we first developed a tool to assist our Customer Care Associates as they worked with customers to identify usage patterns, by seeing daily usage instead of the old method that produced only two data points— usage at the start and end of the month.”

From there, Kiely drove development of an application allowing customers to view their usage online. The final evolution for customers was HUNA (High Use Notification Application) a program that compares daily reads with the customer’s average. For customers signed up for the service, if usage spikes dramatically for several days, an automatic notification goes out by telephone or email. To date, more than 18,000 of these alerts have notified customers of high usage in the home or on the grounds. Often, this is the first sign of a plumbing problem, leaking toilet or other issue, and customers don’t have to wait until a bill arrives – an unusually high one-- to know that there is a problem.

The Utilimetrics Utility Professional Best Practices Award is presented to a utility industry professional who has demonstrated outstanding achievement in the areas of automatic meter reading/advanced metering infrastructure, meter data management, outage management or revenue protection. The award was presented at the Autovation 2011 conference held at the Gaylord Hotel in National Harbor.