Electrica Transilvania Sud carries out meter reading automation using a solution developed by Bento

 

The Challenge

With more than 3.6 million customers, Electrica is a market leader in electric power supply and distribution in Romania, as well as one of the leading players in the energy services sector. The company has over 11.000 employees and an operating profit of EUR 57 million in 2017. In 2012, the company started an internal programme to increase productivity of all supply points. The electricity supply branch Transilvania Sud proposed a data acquisition and metering automation project to read, transfer, centralise and process data from electricity meters in an automated manner.

The Solution

Electrica Transilvania Sud launched a tender procedure for the achievement of this project, following which Adrem Automation was awarded the contract in February 2012. To deliver this project, Adrem chose Bento as subcontractor. After understanding business needs and designing functional requirements, Bento proposed the development of a customized software solution, proposing the C# / .NET technologies for the app, MS-SQL for the databases and MS ClickOnce for deployment and maintenance. A mixed team was put together consisting of 4 Bento specialists and 8 Adrem Automation specialists. Agile Scrum was chosen as development methodology, since the representatives of the client wanted to be up-to-date with the status of the project, virtually directing the development of the solution according to their needs.

Benefits

The platform is at the core of invoicing, by processing, updating and providing data required for approximately 70% of the amount invoiced by the Electrica Transilvania Sud. Electricity meter reading automation resulted in a substantial reduction of the time of collection and centralisation of consumption indexes.