Itron Utility Week’s Knowledge Conference is in full swing, and during one of our morning sessions, we heard from Rusty Cunningham, meter services manager at Connecticut Natural Gas (CNG) and Southern Connecticut Gas Company (SCG). Rusty discussed his customer experience with Itron® Total AMI, Itron’s managed services offering which runs, manages and maintains SCG’s advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution. His session covered the economic and operational benefits the utility has realized utilizing the service.

SCG and CNG are both part of the UIL Holding Company, an energy delivery company that serves Connecticut and Massachusetts. SCG serves 23 towns in Southern Connecticut providing 195,000 customer meters and 11,000 commercial meters.

The relationship between Itron and SCG dates back to 1998, but most recently includes a 20-year contract utilizing Itron Total AMI. The contract provides a complete turn-key network system, which includes Itron Analytics, security, remote shutoff capabilities and hourly reads for all customers. As part of this collaboration, Itron manages all aspects of SCG’s data collection system and operations while freeing utility staff to focus on gaining more benefits and capabilities from their system. Rusty noted that the solution and hourly reads provides a great benefit to customers, such as a customer portal, which allows users to access information and data about their usage.

Throughout his presentation, Rusty noted several key benefits and values in working with Itron for managed services. In addition to the quick implementation of the system, working with Itron decreased risks associated with deploying AMI with the help of our expertise and allowed the utility to realize benefits much sooner. Itron Total AMI also allows SCG operations to focus on gas distribution operations, rather than system upgrades or infrastructure. Our centralized core offering provides them the flexibility to utilize specific services and the option of easily expanding the offering to provide additional services to customers as needed. “We use Itron managed services because it’s easy. It allows us to focus on our jobs, frees our IT resources and the fixed fee system makes budgeting easy.”