Discover Our Smart Meter Installation Process

Whether your utility is installing smart meters for the first time for customers or replacing existing communicating meters with NES meters, it is important that you have a clear idea of what to expect on the installation day.

Highlights of AUW 2019

In May, NES exhibited at the African Utility Week 2019 Conference alongside the OSGP Alliance, and our master VAR in the SADC (Southern African Development Community) region, Remote Metering Solutions (RMS).

The RMS led booth showcased NES smart meters and software solutions and promoted the OSGP ecosystem. It also provided a great conversation hub for utilities and landlords to discover NES’ offerings. Moreover, our team had the chance to meet with our existing clients including JSE and Rapfund.

In addition, NES and the OSGP Alliance were invited speakers as part of the conference panel discussions, where Mark Ossel, NES VP of Global Alliances and Strategic Partnerships and OSGP Board Member, participated as a moderator and panelist in two different sessions:

• Moving towards smarter grid solutions
• Open standardisation advances towards smart metering specification

EXPERT CORNER

Eric Braun

Director of Manufacturing Systems and Quality

Manufacturing complex products can be a tricky thing. It is important to verify every function and feature of your product is working as designed before shipping it to customers. If a manufacturer is only testing its product at the end of the production line, it will be very expensive to fix problems. By detecting problems earlier in the line, a manufacturer is able to reduce expensive rework as well as avoid scrapping a failed product entirely.

Many think manufacturing testing is a highly precise process about applying pure technology. However, that in and of itself is not enough. As with many things, it is part technology, part art. To ensure a quality product meets our strategy, we focus on designing tests to discover critical faults due to badly placed or defective components. The art comes in implementing systems that, as we learn from large volume production data, enable us to continually improve testing. The other part is the process we wrap around the management of our systems. We capture detailed data from each test run on every system across our entire test line. This allows us to perform weekly, and in some cases, real-time quality analysis, which we measure against a defined set of key performance indicators. This enables us to respond rapidly to both active and emerging hotspots. It also gives us forensic visibility, enabling NES to respond quickly to issues reported by our customers.

Testing is only part of the NES production line. We also implement a comprehensive and verifiable calibration process to guarantee our products meet all regulatory requirements. And lastly, our test line design enables NES to offer our customers and partners custom configurations, which can easily be error-prone and labor intensive. This is yet another level of complexity – no easy feat. To ensure a reduction of both, NES uses an expert Meter Configuration System to capture customer customization requirements, tested against a set of compatibility rules. The output generates a set of production files, unique to that customer’s order.

For many reasons, NES is considered an industry leader in this area. NES invests heavily in its testing process, and our test and configuration systems execute close to a thousand unique steps on every single unit under test, bringing our customers products that not only perform well in the field but also last throughout a long life cycle.