Electric Meter Cabinet Reading

Lettura del contatore elettrico per aziende FM con una moltitudine di entità economiche

This app specializes in power meter reading by enabling easy recording and accurate readings to the users for the purpose of cost allocation and management of facilities.

It targets Facility Management companies with a multitude of administrative units and economic entities. Gone are the days when Facility Managers use to encounter the delayed and wrong reporting of entries by their mobile workers.

Our ‘Electric Meter Cabinet Reading’ app is the one stop solution for the Facility Managers to improve the management of various meters including the meter groups within the following organisational levels:

▶ Administrative units

▶ Economic entities

▶ Facilities

▶ Rooms

We took one-step ahead to simplify the process of handling such meters where the managers are allowed to group the meters depending on the availability of the number of meters in each room. In each room, there can be one or more meter groups each with one or more electricity meters.

For identifying each meter group, an NFC tag is mounted that facilitates the reporting and calculation of values belonging to such meter group.

Features:

Our app has room for the following master data handling:

▶ Administrative units

▶ Economic entities

▶ Facilities

▶ Individual rooms

▶ Meter groups

▶ Meter types

▶ Meters

Typical process to read the electricity meters comprises:

▶ Scan the NFC tag mounted on a meter group with an NFC enabled Android device

▶ All meters assigned to this meter group are prompted on the device by way of a displayed list.

▶ The user enters the current meter value besides the meter number twice to ensure accurate reporting. In case of failure of correct meter entry, an error message is displayed.

▶ The user is allowed to take the photo of the current meter value for a better handling of potential disputes

▶ Some plausibility checks are carried out, for example the power consumption of the last time period is compared to the power consumption of current time period and if both the values deviate significantly then the user is promoted to a hint accordingly.

On instance of deactivation of the old meters, in case they are replaced by new meters then the process is carried out as following:

▶ Newly mounted meters must be activated by an office staff once these meters were mounted with the initial registration of master data by the field workers. This ensures high reliability of the master data as well as completion of adding all contractual data to the database.

▶ Users with extended user rights are available with a table in the app listing all the power meters that have not been read after a given date. This ensures that no meters are forgotten to be read in each time period to ensure accuracy.

▶ The app detects if a power meter started to count from 0 again after reaching its maximum value ensuring correct power consumption to be calculated.

Important features of ginstr web which is the office software for this app:

▶ All data is stored in the ginstr cloud and can be further processed with ginstr web.

▶ Sophisticated search options are available including filter and computation features which makes it easy to handle the master data as well as the data related to the meter readings

▶ For further processing of the recorded data with third party applications all data can be exported to CSV or Excel files

▶ For seamless initial setup of the database it is possible to import existing master data through Excel or CSV files into the ginstr cloud

Benefits of using ginstr app:

▶ Error free identification of the power meter groups by way of NFC

▶ Immediate plausibility check during the onsite data detection

▶ the data is available in real-time; no reading records can be lost on the way to the office

▶ no more tedious and error prone transferring of the data from paper to electronic mode

▶ usage-dependent invoices can be prepared immediately after the reading

▶ the electric meter can be photographed for better handling of potential disputes