A tool to increase information-processing capacity for consumer water meter data

Background: Water service providers invoice most South African urban consumers forthe water they use every month. A secure treasury system generates water invoices atmunicipalities’ financial departments. Information about the water usage of customers initiallycomes from reading the water meters, usually located in gardens near the front boundariesof properties. Until as recently as 1990, the main purpose of the water meter readings was togenerate invoices for water usage. There are various treasury systems for this purpose.Objective: The objective of this research article was to describe the development of Swift,a locally developed software tool for analysing water meter data from an informationmanagement perspective, which engineers in the water field generally use, and to assesscritically the influence of Swift on published research and industry. This article focuses onwater usage and the challenge of data interchange and extraction as issues that variousindustries face.Method: This article presents the first detailed report on Swift. It uses a detailed knowledgereview and presents and summarises the findings chronologically.Results: The water meter data flow path used to be quite simple. The risk of breaches inconfidentiality was limited. Technological advances over the years have led to additionalknowledge coming from the same water meter readings with subsequent research outputs.However, there are also complicated data flow paths and increased risks. Users have usedSwift to analyse more than two million consumers’ water meter readings to date. Studies haveculminated in 10 peer-reviewed journal articles using the data. Seven of them were in the lastfive years.Conclusion: Swift-based data was the basis of various research studies in the past decade.Practical guidelines in the civil engineering fraternity for estimating water use in South Africahave incorporated knowledge from these studies. Developments after 1995 have increased theinformation processing capacity for water meter data.