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Tshwane Innovates on Meter Reading, Revenue Collection

Kathy Gibson — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 07:06:52 +0000

Kathy Gibson is at Saphila Transcend in Sun City – Collecting revenue from electricity users is vital for the City of Tshwane’s financial health, but outdated and inefficient systems have been playing havoc with its ability to do so efficiently.

The city, which serves around 4-million citizens, had to come up with revenue strategies against a backdrop of numerous challenges.

, chief solutions architect at , explains that Tshwane recognised that there were a few ways it could improve revenue collection.

The first of these strategies was the Tshwane yaTina campaign that focused on disconnecting non-paying users.

It also realised that installing prepaid meters for indebted consumers could help to lower non-payment, along with other interventions such as implementing debit orders or negotiating payment plans.

Large power users (LPUs) like factories or malls are the biggest consumers, so connecting them to a pre-payment platform would make a big difference.

Simplifying payment platforms for all users would go hand-in-hand with outreach programmes to engage with customers who might not be able to reach the city with queries or payments.

Meter reading was identified as a key step in completing the meter to cash lifecycle.

Electricity makes up a big portion of the city’s service charges, which include water and sanitation. For a few years, revenue was growing well, then fell off by almost R5-billion in the 2022/2023 financial year – probably as the effects from Covid-19 came through the system.

In the 2023/2024 period, the revenue collected rose again, by almost R5-billion.

To reverse the negative trend and get revenue moving in the right direction, Molefe explains that the City of Tshwane leveraged a number of digital technologies to enhance service delivery and increase payments.

PhD, group head: shared services at the City of Tshwane, points out that revenue and customer engagement both suffered during the Covid period.

“But revenue management is one of the biggest causes of financial distress for local governments, and it affects the social sustainability of municipalities.”

Revenue collection was experiencing a number of challenges associated with delays in manual meter reading, as well as theft, tampering, and faulty meters.

This resulted in revenue leakages – while under-collection became a problem due to longer meter reading and billing cycles, and inaccurate meter readings and estimation.

Compounding the challenges were fragmented and non-integrated systems coupled with inaccurate customer information and insufficient customer channels.

“The range of challenges extended beyond these,” Khumalo adds. “But the biggest challenge was in billing – if you can’t do this correctly, you have a problem. And you can’t do credit control on wrong billing, because the customer will simply reject any action.

“The second part of the problem was collections. Now that you have billed, you have to collect.

“And, finally, we needed a way to interact with customers receiving the service and recognising that there are different types of customers: those that pay happily, those that pay grudgingly, those that battle to pay or pay late – possibly because they are distressed – and those who simply never pay.”

The city turned to a public-private partnership (PPP) engagement model to help solve its many issues.

Khumalo explains that in 2019 Tshwane transitioned away from a single 51��support partner by enabling a panel of service providers to provide support, enhancement, and implementation of SAP-related solutions. This led to the appointment of three service providers, with Zimele responsible for 51��Utilities and CRM.

“They were mandated to assess and understand the current setup, and identify a digital transformation roadmap.”

Zimele proposed a solution in three phases.

Short-term wins would empower meter readers, giving them the tools to be effective. This phase would see the implementation of an advanced metering infrastructure with MDMS for LPUs, and the implementation of SAP-based meter reading applications.

The medium-term is about empowering users, with wins enabled by the implementation of SAP-based financial management with a credit control application, and the implementation of the (wallet) solution for LPUs.

In the long-term, the plan is to implement the Sinch Contact Centre with omnichannel and extensions, and the implementation of the RPS solution for debt management.

“The long-term wins aim to build long-term relationships with our customers,” Khumalo says. “So, we will be able to tailor the message to the customer.

“Part of the what the roadmap looked at was to not simply throw technology and tools at the problems,” says Khumalo. “This is what usually happens: people panic and think about what they can buy.”

But the City of Tshwane was also in the middle of a move to so it needed to think holistically about people, technology, tools, and processes.

The city’s implementation strategy started with understanding the environment, while also looking to the future.

Khumalo explains that this involved also understanding the audit environment, including assessment and due diligence. A surprising initial finding was that 200 large users were not actually being billed at all.

The project roadmap involved implementing smart meter integration components in the first phases, digital mobile applications in the second phase, and customer engagement in the third phase.

Among the benefits that the city has already seen are seamless and direct integration to the core billing systems and a faster revenue collection cycle.

In addition, reporting is now in one system, a lot of manual work has been automated, and the city is getting an omnichannel and 360-degree view of the customer.

“We have solved not just finance problems, but also financial management,” Khumalo says.

Molefe explains that when Zimele got involved, Tshwane’s meter reading accuracy was just 27%. The new solutions were able to quickly move this to over 80%, and not long after, well into the 90% and above range.

Initially, the city was running an 51��system for billing, but the meters were not integrated. They had been sourced from a number of different vendors, with some being prepaid, some smart, and some traditional meters.

“We had to identify where the savings were to be had,” Molefe says. “We realised that 80% of the revenue sits with LPUs and that showed us where our focus needed to be.”

Zimele quickly realised that Tshwane had AMI licences that were not being used, so these were quickly activated.

“We converted the PI to PO, and now we had an integrated platform.”

The next step was to install the MDMS, which had to be meter agnostic because of the wide range of meter types out in the field.

The city already had a communication network which was activated so smart meters can talk seamlessly into the ISU. This also allows meters to be managed from the system.

“So we were live on AMI and MDMS, but some customers still had communication issues,” Khumalo explains. “So we brought in a meter-reading app that also integrates seamlessly into ISU.

“The ISU can now send instructions to readers about where they must read meters, and those readings are synched immediately. This means the back-office can start doing validations.”

Traditionally, the meter reading cycle is five days, which means there is no time to resolve issues. And the importation of flat files means the city can’t identify issues as they occur.

“By synching reading automatically, you can pick up issues and send people out to resolve them,’ Molefe says. “You can also measure the performance of the reader, check they went to the right properties, and that they did the readings.”

Field service management used to be an issue. When meters are replaced, there is a process within ISU to create a new meter in SAP. This can take about 15 minutes per meter.

“So we wrote a meter replacement program that captures details of what’s happening in realtime; and an engine in the system does the replacement within seconds.”

A similar system takes care of disconnections.

One of the biggest benefits of the new system is in converting LPUs from post-paid to prepaid.

“Once AMI was stabilised, we activated prepayment,” Molefe says. “A typical cycle would have been to receive payment 60 to 90 days after the power was consumed. Now, they pay before they consume. This has had a positive spin-off for the city.”

When thinking about customer engagement, Tshwane had to recognise that not every citizen has a smartphone. “But people may want to pay their accounts or submit readings, so we instituted a USSD solution. Now users don’t need a fancy phone to engage – and as many consumers as possible are included.”

Looking ahead, the City of Tshwane aims to expand its smart services and increase citizen engagement. It will improve financial transparency, increase revenue channels, and start enjoying AI-driven efficiency.

All services will be available in a municipal digital marketplace.

Finally, the city is engaged in ensuring that its people are empowered. “You can build the best system, but if people do not understand how to use it, you end up with a white elephant,” says Molefe.

“People need to be enabled, so change management and training are key.”

This article first appeared in .

The post Tshwane Innovates on Meter Reading, Revenue Collection appeared first on 51��Africa News Center.

Revenue Assurance Gives Utilities Fair Footing for Growth, Just Transition

Hannes Venter, Industry Value Advisor: Utilities at 51��Africa — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 09:27:28 +0000

No company can survive a consistent loss in revenue. When companies fail to collect the revenue owed for services rendered, it puts pressure on their cash flow that could leave them unable to cover their operational costs, struggle to grow, and even enter into decline.

This is proving abundantly clear in the African utilities sector, where non-payment, consumption-based fraud, illegal connections and other factors are costing billions in lost revenue.

Power utility Eskom recently revealed that . This has led to a R51-billion debt by municipalities, adding to Eskom’s significant R400-billion debt burden and hampering the utility’s plans to build additional capacity or its transition to renewable energy.

In East Africa, Kenya Power has investigated cases of fraud in its post-paid billing system, .

This issue is prevalent in the utilities sector of other regions too. A 2017 study estimated that . This places enormous pressure on utilities and hampers efforts to improve service delivery to customers, adopt new, more sustainable forms of energy, and scale into new markets.

Revenue assurance mitigates fraud, reduces losses

In the utilities sector, several factors contribute to lost revenue, including faulty metering, inaccurate billing, ineffective revenue collection, consumption-based fraud, leaks, and issues with incorrect customer accounts and contracts.

As the sector shifts to meet the utility needs of a growing population – Africa’s population is expected to – and pressure grows to move to more sustainable, less carbon-intensive forms of energy, maintaining high levels of revenue collection will be critical.

A vital component of optimal revenue collection is the practice of revenue assurance.

Revenue assurance is a way of increasing an organisation’s income by identifying areas where revenue is lost, and minimising such losses by fixing the cause of lost revenue.

found that it takes an organisation twelve months to detect a typical fraud case, with the average annual loss across industries amounting to $1.8-million. In fact, an estimated 5% of revenue is lost to fraud every year.

In response, organisations need to leverage the power of technology to improve fraud detection, risk mitigation and fraud prevention capabilities.

Using a revenue assurance tool is one way for utilities to detect anomalies earlier. This can help them reduce financial loss, improve the accuracy of detection at a lower cost, and improve their ability to predict and prevent future occurrences of revenue leakage.

Leveraging tech to improve revenue collection

A growing number of utilities are using tools such as 51��Business Integrity Screening in combination with 51��partner solutions to improve revenue assurance and plug any gaps in operations that may lead to revenue loss.

By leveraging powerful analytics and big data capabilities, revenue assurance tools help utilities identify potential cases of fraud and proactively inform technical teams to investigate.

For example, if a customer’s energy consumption stays exactly the same month after month despite seasonal changes, there is a likelihood that some form of fraud is being committed. Energy use usually increases and decreases in different seasons, with most customers using less power in summer when it’s warm compared to winter when heaters are used and electrical hot water heaters work harder to stay warm.

By tracking energy consumption patterns over long periods of time and matching that data to seasonal consumption models, utilities can leverage their revenue assurance tool to ensure they always collect the optimal revenue from every customer.

By using predictive models and integrating the revenue assurance functionality to their enterprise resource planning core, utilities can develop a better understanding of known customer usage patterns. Over time, utilities can apply this knowledge to develop detection methods and strategies that can highlight unknown patterns that may indicate fraud or revenue leakage.

African utilities are at a pivotal moment as booming population growth and rapid economic development pushes them into building greater capacity while also transitioning to a clean energy future. However, without optimal revenue collection, utilities will lack the financial agility to survive and thrive during this disruptive time.

With the clever application of technology, however, utilities can mitigate the risk of fraud and ensure they have the financial stability to take a leading role in our continent’s development and just energy transition.