Hi, I'm Christophe de Klerk.
At Unity,
I'm responsible for the Smart Metering Project.
Unity is part of the Solutions 30 Group
and we are a leader in Belgium in the field services area.
Our ambition is to be the trusted partner
for our clients in telecommunications,
energy,
ICT and security.
Unity is helping Fluvius,
the red company in Flanders,
with the replacement of millions of
analog electricity and gas meters.
They all need to be replaced by a digital one before the end of 2029.
By doing this,
we needed to tackle two challenges.
We should know that our technicians are asked to take
a picture every time they've installed a new meter.
We noticed that sometimes the photos were blurry.
This is a problem because then we need to send the technician back.
There was also a second challenge and
that is that our quality controls,
which were typically performed by the back office,
they were done the day after and we were only
able to control 15% of all installations.
So we wanted to automate quality control.
We also wanted to improve our documentation of our works
and that is why we decided to partner up with Diplomatic.
It's the first of its kind project in Belgium and it's based on great
AI-based technology and it truly empowers our energy technicians.
So basically the technician gets a work order in his tablet software.
He then performs this actual swapping of the meter
and he performs some administration afterwards.
This is where the Diplomatic solution comes in.
The AI algorithm is able to perform around 25 visual checks
in real time and it gives instant feedback to the technician.
This is really cool because if you get instant feedback,
you really know what the technician is.
So at the time,
what went wrong?
But it's not only interesting for the technician.
It's also interesting for the quality
control and the operations management teams.
They get valuable insights about the
level of compliance of our operations.
After the implementation of the Diplomatic project,
we actually observed a higher number of compliant operations.
We have greatly reduced the number of revisits that
were necessary to take a new picture and now we're
able to run our operations more cost-effective.
I'm a true believer in short feedback loops.
I'm a true believer in short feedback loops and this is why artificial intelligence is so great.
It gives instant feedback to the technician.
I was actually very impressed by the ease of implementation.
It only took us two months before the start of the project
and to have a working solution.
In conclusion,
we've learned a lot of doing this project in
the installation of electricity and gas meters
and we're now using our knowledge
to implement our
integrated into the system.
We're integrated into another domain,
the domain of the smart water meter.
And we're also looking into other domains like fiber to the home
or electric car chargers.
