Developing a customer connectivity model for electrical utilities

Customer demand for electricity supply is vastly increasing due to urbanization and changing needs. Thus electrical utilities need to accurately determine load profiles for different sectors of the supply area, so that new customers can be seamlessly added. To obtain such information a customer connectivity model needs to be developed and implemented such that historical customer data from various systems can be consolidated and validated. eThekwini Municipality's Electricity Unit has created such a model that uses information from billing systems, asset management system, spatial systems, etc. to create a data warehouse where customers are uniquely identified. The results showed that, on average, 85% of customer data was correctly captured. This prompted the need for the utility to rectify the remaining customer data and maintain it.