The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) is updating all of its downstream assets and customer information, under the Customer & Assets Information Management System (CAIMS) project.
The project aims at sanitise and digitise the company’s assets databases and fully enumerate its customers.
The CAIMS project, rolled out about two years ago, involves the tagging of assets including distribution transformers, LV poles, building structures and metres with unique QR code tags.
The attributes of each tagged asset and customer information is uploaded unto the CAIMS application, available for official use.
So far, about 3.3 million unique ECG assets have been tagged under the project nationwide.
The CAIMS project manager, and Director of project planning, monitoring and evaluation, Charles Obeng touted the benefits of a digitised assets register for the company.
“An updated assets database empowers the company to accurately pinpoint the GPS location of all assets. This gives the company an accurate customer data and improves energy accounting, aiding more targeted revenue mobilisation exercises,” he said.
Mr. Obeng was optimistic that the current completion rate of 22.8% across ECG’s operational districts will improve as the team moves into other areas soon.
The project implementation is in collaboration with the military. Personnel from the Engineering regiment have been deployed alongside ECG field staff to expedite the asset tagging activities.
Acting General Manager, ECG Accra West region, Ing. Emmanuel Ankrah was hopeful about the revolutionary impact of the digitised database, and encouraged customers to collaborate with the field team that visit their premises.
“These field officers have been trained to properly identify themselves when they visit customer premises. This is to engender trust with the customers, and prevent miscreants from taking advantage to swindle unsuspecting customers”, he said.
BY Gibril Abdul Razak