Meralco harnesses the power of data to drive business success

Actionable insights from Cloudera’s data management technology allow Meralco to make data-driven decisions to prevent outages and increase customer satisfaction.

The Manila Electric Company (Meralco), Philippines’ largest electric power distribution company, is strengthening its digital transformation efforts by harnessing the full potential of its data to deliver more value to customers. 

Partnering Cloudera to develop its custom flagship analytics platform, Meralco Data Platform (MDP), Meralco is able to process and run data via various machine learning models, implement predictive analytics, and integrate the data silos within the organization to unlock full data visibility. 

With Cloudera, Meralco plans to achieve greater operational efficiencies and better customer experience.

“By unlocking the value of information to insights and harnessing the connected intelligence across Meralco, we bring to light where and how we can drive exceptional service to our customers, streamline our internal operations and create new opportunities for innovation – fully recognizing the power of data as an enabler to business growth,” said Rocky D. Bacani, Meralco First Vice President and Head of Information, Communication, Technology and Transformation.

Meralco is committed to delivering service excellence by leveraging data – bringing safe, stable and reliable power to homes, businesses, and COVID-19 vital facilities.

To accommodate growing data requirements as well as the need for more efficient data management, Meralco required a robust data platform that could handle the volume and speed at which data was collected and generated across its online channels, electricity supply chain management systems, and more.

Custom solution

Driven by its customer-centricity and digital transformation program, the company had to implement a solution that could store and integrate data from across the organization while eliminating data silos, allowing them to use various data to improve customer service.

Cloudera worked with Meralco to develop a custom solution, a flagship analytics platform that processes Meralco’s data and runs various machine learning (ML) models.

Through the MDP, Meralco has improved the turnaround time for the provision of electricity services, while raising customer satisfaction levels through analysis of customer concerns and inquiries. MDP has allowed Meralco to implement predictive analytics for improved identification of secondary lines for rehabilitation and overloaded distribution transformers. These predictive models helped line offices conduct targeted field verification and facility correction, which resulted in prevention of probable outages to almost 200,000 customers in 2021.

With Cloudera’s support, Meralco was able to integrate data silos within the organization. This will provide Meralco with full visibility of relevant data that they can leverage to know more about the needs and behavior of their customers, which will in turn uncover more opportunities to further improve customer experience at every touchpoint, improve asset and grid management, and increase operational efficiency.

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.

“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.