Meter Reading Quality Control
About Us
What we do
Meter Reading Quality Control - MRQC - is your end-to-end meter-reading gatekeeper.
Maximizing billing accuracy for utility providers
Every month municipalities and utility providers bill their customers for consumption of utilities such as water, electricity, and gas. Poor quality meter readings affect the billing cycle adversely: meters must be re-read, customer enquiries take up precious time and the overall customer experience diminishes.
Oftentimes poor-quality readings cannot be distinguished from fraudulent behavior such as meter reversals, electricity or water theft and meter concealment. Poor quality meter readings create a climate for poor service delivery and fraud.
MRQC is responsible for improving the quality of meter readings. It screens meter readings at various stages in the billing cycle. It catches exceptions that are passed onto workers to resolve. Common exceptions include hidden or concealed meters, meter not found, malfunctioning meters, no readings for a certain time frame and incorrect capturing of minor digits (decimals). When an exception is raised it is put into a worklist. Exceptions can be resolved by re-reading a meter (audit reading), pre-editing (manual correction of data for obvious errors).
It is not only errors that affect the quality of readings; normal changes of identifiers such as account numbers, street names, townships and stand number are a source for confusion. MRQC recognizes when identifiers change and adjusts its internal data accordingly. This creates a seamless transition of historical data to new identifiers, thus keeping a track record of consumption at any premises.
MRQC can be seen as the data-guard between meter reading contractors and the council’s billing systems. In the case of Johannesburg MRQC has improved meter reading accuracy from 65% to well over 90%.
MRQC also monitors the performance of the meter reading contractors. Monthly contractor reports are produced on performance indicators such as accuracy levels, number of actual readings and turnaround time.