Celesta reads meters for Minol — MobileMonday Global: Industry News

^{600 send reading to SAP-system} Celesta reads meters for Minol

10 Feb 2004 at 08:57 GMT Timo Poropudas

Celesta mBusiness Ltd provides a wireless meter reading solution to Minol Messtechnik, a leading German meter reading and billing service provider with a staff of 600 meter readers. With this wireless meter reading solution Minol’s meter readers will use their rugged PDA terminals to receive their metering schedules, record the metering data on site and send the readings wirelessly over GPRS to Minol’s SAP back-office system.

Minol is a manufacturer and service provider of devices for the consumption-based computation of heating, hot water and cold water costs both in Germany and abroad. Use of Celesta’s wireless meter reading solution eliminates the conventional and time-consuming post-processing of data on paper forms.

“We save pallet loads of paper and can create invoices much, much faster for our customers”, states Marcus Lehmann, Managing Director of Minol. “Use of the Celesta system is a quantum leap, allowing us drastically streamline our processes and improve our service to our customers”, he says.

Sakari Vaara, the Managing Director of Celesta states: “Minol will significantly increase their competitive edge by automating their mission critical business processes in the field with this wireless meter reading solution based on our mBusiness platform. When the business processes do change, Minol can also easily modify or add new wireless solutions onto this platform.”

The first 50 meter readers will trial the new paperless process in a pilot project until the middle of the year. By the end of 2004, all 600 Minol employees will be equipped with data-capable terminals.

Process integration is based on Celesta’s proprietary mBusiness software platform, which enables intelligent applications on portable terminals with Microsoft Pocket PC or Symbian operating systems and push/pull communications with back-office systems such as SAP R/3. Minol has, therefore, a wide range of standard terminals from multiple manufacturers to choose from.

The two companies will be demonstrating the solution at this year’s E-World energy & water, to be held in Essen on February 10–12.