Optimized customer experience for national electricity distributor, Manila Electric Company (Meralco)

Partnering to deliver essential power across the Philippines

When Manila Electric Company (Meralco), the largest electric power distribution company in the Philippines, needed to strengthen its digital transformation efforts by harnessing its vast amount of data to deliver more value to its customers, they chose to partner with Cloudera, the gold-standard for hybrid data companies, and Talend, a global leader in data integration and data management. By leveraging these two world class partners, Meralco was able to achieve greater operational efficiencies and raise customer satisfaction.

Meralco is committed to delivering safe, stable, and reliable power to homes, businesses, and mission critical facilities. Meralco was challenged by ever-increasing data requirements as well as the need for more efficient data management.  They required a robust data platform that could handle the volume and speed at which data was collected and generated across its online channels and its electricity supply chain management systems, and one that would eliminate data silos and allow them to use various data to improve customer service.

Cleaner data for faster analytics: Meralco Data Platform (MDP)

Cloudera and Talend collaborated with Meralco to define business requirements and to develop a custom solution - a flagship analytics platform that processes Meralco’s data and runs various machine learning (ML) models. The solution, Meralco Data Platform (MDP), has improved the turnaround time for provisioning electricity services while raising customer satisfaction levels through analysis of customer concerns and inquiries. MDP has enabled Meralco to revolutionize its data collection, processing, and utilization, to serve as the unified business intelligence and analytics platform that leverages its data to extract information and insights.

As part of the Talend-Cloudera solution, the Talend Data Fabric helps provide clean, complete, uncompromised data to the MDP, enabling advanced analytics, dashboards and reporting capabilities that leverage enriched Machine Learning. Talend was also able to broaden data access and offer a self-service platform for business users to consume quality data.  This enabled Meralco to innovate and modernize its data infrastructure, support a new data lake, data warehouses, data science workbenches and the rationalization of a business intelligence platform.

The MDP solution has allowed Meralco to implement predictive analytics for improved identification of secondary lines for rehabilitation and overloaded distribution transformers. These predictive models help line offices conduct targeted field verification and facility correction, which helps Meralco head-off possible power outages and interruptions for their customers and minimizes emergency repairs.

A single source of truth for all stakeholders

Meralco has also leveraged MDP to launch M-Wing, a single-source management dashboard, accessible on-line via mobile devices, for reporting of key performance indicators. The business performance reports are presented internally to Meralco and the Board, as well as externally to investors and the media.

The MDP is a significant milestone in Meralco’s data-driven strategy championed by Meralco President and CEO Atty. Ray C. Espinosa, which is to elevate the utilization of data and technology to advance the company’s goals of delivering value to the business and providing excellent customer service.

“We’re delighted to support Meralco on its data journey and enable data-driven decision-making to provide value for both the organization and its customers. Cloudera’s scalable hybrid data management and analytics platform will help Meralco streamline data and maximize the value gained through its entire data lifecycle.” said Remus Lim, Vice President of Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloudera.