About Saint John Water:
Saint John Water supports the Community in achieving its long-term vision and goal for safe, clean drinking water. Services are delivered to enhance the quality of drinking water and protect the natural environment with the treatment of wastewater.
Thanks to Saint John Water for being a Silver Sponsor of the ACWWA 2021 Annual Conference!
Thanks to Saint John Water for being a Silver Sponsor of the ACWWA 2020 Annual Conference!
2020 Technical Presentations from Saint John Water:
Abstract: Water Usage Customer Portal – A Useful Tool for the Water Wise Consumer
Day 2: December 9, 2020 at 12:05 PM AT
Saint John Water recently completed the implementation of a fully functional, fixed based, radio frequency meter reading system also known as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). This system gathers hourly consumption data from radios attached to each individual water meter in the City’s water distribution system.
Although the AMI system succeeded in facilitating and automating the billing process for all of the City’s metered customers. Customers themselves were unable to access/monitor their own consumption. Customers who were interested in monitoring their own consumption had been doing so via multiple phone calls to City staff and a manual data transfer. This process did not serve customers well and consumed a lot of staff time with repetitive administrative tasks.
The lack of an effective way for customers to monitor their own consumption was especially troublesome in cases of a water leak. Water leaking on private property could remain undetected until customers received a high consumption letter from the City. This letter would only be generated during the bi-monthly billing process and customers could therefore experience an unknown ongoing leak for periods up to 2 months.
The goal of this presentation will be to provide the audience with a summary of the benefits of a water usage customer portal including lessons learned during the implementation. A customer portal helps utilities improve customer engagement and client satisfaction by opening data and offering a means for customers to monitor and access their water consumption in real time.
The customer portal has allowed Saint John Water customers to:
- View their current and historical water usage in graphical format;
- See an estimate of their bill during the billing cycle; and
- Set a billing and usage threshold and be notified via their means of choice (email, text message, cell phone, home phone or work phone) if they are trending to, or have exceeded their personally set threshold.
About Pierre LeBlanc:
Pierre LeBlanc is a Professional Engineer in the Province of New Brunswick and he is currently the Operations Manager with Saint John Water where he is part of a team that operates a utility with assets valued at approximately $2 billion and an annual operating budget of approximately $50M. Pierre has a green belt in Lean Six Sigma and he has lead various continuous improvement projects for the utility. Pierre is also a certified water distribution class 4 and wastewater collection class 2 water and wastewater operator.
He was a utility team member on the Safe, Clean Drinking Water Project – the largest municipal project in the history of the Province of New Brunswick at $216.8M.
Prior to his current role, Pierre was a Project Engineer with the City of Saint John’s engineering group where he led a variety of capital projects. He was also a Project Engineer with Crandall Engineering prior to his work with the City of Saint John.