Goldcard Smart Group Co., Ltd
Industry: IoT
Website: http://www.china-goldcard.com/
Core business: gas and water metering
Contact Sales
+852-800-931-122

Customer Voices

Goldcard Smart Group Co., Ltd

Huawei has mature digital platform technologies and has been dedicated to ecosystem development for many years. We've cooperated with Huawei for 3 to 4 years. In addition to understanding our needs and providing technical support and assistance, Huawei discusses a variety of cooperation and business modes. Huawei has invested a lot in the certification phase of our solution, which greatly improves the solution security and performance. This is far beyond our expectation.

We believe that Huawei has provided well developed functionality on its IoT platform. In the future, we hope to cooperate with vertical industry experts in Huawei who can quickly understand our requirements. Our teams have made attempts and technical preparations for big data applications, but we need further assistance on how to create new value. Huawei has abundant cross-industry experience, which we believe will benefit us greatly, and they are able to provide case studies we can learn from. IoT development has no boundaries, and we hope that with the help of Huawei's platform and ecosystem partners, we can apply our best practices from smart gas to other fields, such as smart homes and smart cities.

Customer Voices

About Goldcard

Goldcard Smart Group Co., Ltd is a smart public utility solution provider. It was founded in 1997 and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2012 (stock code: 300349). Oriented toward customer requirements, Goldcard provides innovative end-to-end solutions covering smart devices, communications networks, application management software, and Internet cloud services. The company now serves over 20 countries, 1500 cities, 2000+ public utility customers, and 40 million urban families. It is the world leader in the Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) smart gas metering space and is committed to promoting the application of smart utilities worldwide.

Challenges

Urban public utilities affect people's well-being. Everyone uses tap water, electricity, gas, and heaters for cooking, laundry, heating every day, generating huge amounts of metering data. Under the pressure of high user demand and operating expenses (OPEX), traditional utilities face the following problems that can be addressed by IoT, cloud computing, and big data technologies:

·High OPEX

·Simple profit model unable to fully explore data value

·Inefficient O&M on the pipeline network

Some enterprises have begun to manage and maintain their pipeline networks through routine manual inspection and the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) remote monitoring system, geographic information system (GIS), pipeline network inspection system, and gas metering and analysis system; but they do not share their data. Separately managed data is inaccurate, unintelligent, and unhelpful for monitoring pipeline network vulnerabilities or realizing value.

Public utility enterprises are in urgent need of new business models that capitalize on the profit potential and limitless possibilities of emerging IoT technologies.

    Why HUAWEI CLOUD IoT

    NB-IoT technology can perform remote operations, such as stable real-time metering, device status monitoring, and instruction delivery, with high security and at low cost. The collected data and status reports are analyzed and processed immediately to implement targeted, scientific, dynamic management, improving the management efficiency and performance of public utilities.

    The NB-IoT solution targets the following key concerns:

    • Pain points in traditional metering

    Compared to traditional metering, the NB-IoT solution brings reduced metering costs, real time data analysis, efficient management of metering data, quick fault location, reduced OPEX, and improved operational efficiency.

    • Data security

    The solution ensures data reliability with high anti-interference capability, security, and technical support. It is easy to use and can be widely applied to guarantee data security.

    • Power consumption

    NB-IoT technology is used with low-power signal collection units, significantly reducing power consumption.

    • Network coverage

    NB-IoT technology features wide coverage, high capacity, and high reliability.

    • Massive connection volume

    A unified IoT platform is established and accessible to a large number of IoT applications. The platform facilitates interconnection and data exchange by avoiding protocol incompatibility and simplifying vendor integration.

    Solution

    IoT communication technologies, especially NB-IoT, can avoid the incompatibility between remote communication protocols used by water, electricity, and gas meters. NB-IoT has lower power consumption, wider coverage, and supports more connections than traditional communications technologies, making it highly suitable for remote metering. Basic data including the amount of used resources, device battery charge, signal, valve status, and exceptions, are sent to the IoT platform through built-in NB-IoT communication modules. The IoT cloud platform then gleans insights from the received data, bringing value to enterprises.

    The IoT cloud platform is an essential link between the IoT network and the industry chain. It connects to the IoT sensor layer, from which basic data of meters, pipes, and other public facilities are uploaded; and to application service providers, offering a basic development platform and a unified data interface to underlying networks. Device management, control, and operation functionalities are all available on the IoT platform, along with service capabilities applicable to all industries, such as data processing and analysis, communications management, device maintenance, and application development.

    ESLink, a subsidiary of Goldcard, has established an end-to-end integrated SaaS cloud service platform based on Huawei's OceanConnect ecosystem. On this platform, enterprise customers can use any tools and applications on demand and at low cost. The platform can also connect to external customers, employees, online devices, and partners to gather unified, authentic, and accurate big data, helping create value for customers.

    Advanced technologies, such as cloud computing, big data, IoT, mobile Internet, and AI, are used to solve common industry problems, simplifying enterprise O&M.

    ·IoT can remotely transmit data and reduce manual metering workloads, decreasing labor costs by 30%. A single Goldcard IoT data collection platform server can process data from more than 3.3 million online meters. Since rolling out the solution, Goldcard has performed metering more than 3.2 billion times in total, with a throughput of 40,000 per second.

    ·Device pricing is determined and remotely adjusted based on big data, responding to fluctuating market needs in real time. Fees are automatically calculated in the background, eliminating all the mistakes that occur in traditional pricing.

    ·Industry services are moved onto the cloud, integrating multimedia channels and providing lightweight services. Bills are pushed from the cloud and online payment is supported anytime, anywhere. Smart services create more value and reduce the workload of frontline clerical staff by 60%.

    ·AI provides automatic customer service. Smart online bots are online 24 hours a day, reducing the workload of manual customer service by 50%.

    ·Devices and data are connected, improving response speed by 30%, and reducing wait time from hours to minutes.

    ·Cloud and data are converged, improving management efficiency by 40%. Time taken to complete a task is reduced from days to hours.

    ·End-to-end high-end security design, improving security control by 50% and reducing time taken for security management from minutes to seconds.

    Solution

    Testimonials

    IoT provides a cloud-device interconnection approach that transforms public utilities, making them digitalized, informatized, and intelligent. Collaboration between Goldcard and HUAWEI CLOUD has brought the following benefits:

    By analyzing and using big data collected from devices, public utility enterprises can monitor abnormal usage and manage measurement shortages, thereby improving the overall operating efficiency of their pipeline networks.

    Gas enterprises can monitor security devices and receive alarms. Based on massive volumes of data, they can also develop machine learning models and algorithms to predict gas usage, analyze abnormal behavior, and take countermeasures, such as adjusting pipeline pressure in peak and off-peak hours.

    Enterprises can also develop value-added services. In addition to providing natural gas, tap water, and electricity, they can sell gas stoves, water purifiers, and energy-saving appliances based on big data to increase profitability.

    A large amount of business data is generated in daily service operations, including basic user data, behavioral data, and customer service data. Enterprises can extract user profiles from collected data to design advertising content for cross-selling and targeted marketing.