Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA)’s services are available round the clock, from channels and smart services that operate at the highest levels of availability, reliability and efficiency. DEWA supports Dubai’s progress in leading the future by reworking the traditional concepts of work mechanisms to suit the rapid global changes and strengthen Dubai’s position as an incubator for creativity and a beacon of innovation to ensure it leads in anticipating and shaping the future.
HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, MD & CEO of DEWA said that DEWA has taken major steps toward this goal. In recent times, DEWA achieved the top position across Dubai Government in implementing the Dubai Paperless Strategy, for the second consecutive time. DEWA has cut its paper usage by 82% in the Large Entities category, which use more than 10 million sheets of paper annually.
“DEWA’s strategy enhances digital transformation and achieves the vision of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, and the directives of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council of Dubai, to transform Dubai Government into a fully digital government and the first paperless government by the end of 2021.
This is being achieved by putting innovation at the top of our priorities to achieve governmental strategies and plans, including the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence 2031; the UAE Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution; Dubai 10X initiative; and the Dubai Paperless Strategy to transform Dubai’s government into the world's first government; conducting all its applicable transactions via the Blockchain network by 2020, as well as other government strategies and initiatives that employ future technologies and benefit from them to achieve customer and society happiness,” said Al Tayer.
DEWA shapes a new digital future for Dubai through Digital DEWA, its digital arm. Through Digital DEWA, we redefine the concept of utilities. DEWA will disrupt the entire business of public utilities by becoming the world’s first digital utility to use autonomous systems for renewable energy and storage and expand the use of AI and providing digital services.
DEWA launched its corporate application Smart Office for its employees in 2015, to provide an internal application that provides different services and procedures for employees. The application was a paradigm shift in providing smart and digital services, due to its resilience to use remotely and several features that ensures ease, speed, and efficiency of daily tasks anywhere and anytime.
The Smart Office provides several services that enhance and enrich the employee experience and their efficiency. It enables employees to complete internal approvals to ensure seamless work process around the clock. Approvals include contract and purchase requests, comparing prices, pricing requests, and electronic training requests. It also enables DEWA’s staff to check in and check out at any of DEWA’s premises, using GPS to identify the employee’s location when arriving and leaving DEWA’s offices.
This is in addition to a work ID and a guide for DEWA’s laws and policies. DEWA provided to People of Determination Absher office to submit requests and follow-up on them easily. DEWA’s employees contribute to the development and improvement of the application through requesting a service, which enables them to participate in the improvement process.
The Smart Office provides Afkari platform to encourage employees to propose their innovative ideas. The platform enables them to submit their ideas anytime and anywhere, as well as seeing and voting for their colleagues’ ideas. The application provides a special service for the senior management such as a dashboard to view the most important reports immediately and make decisions accordingly.
The Smart Office application provides a range of awareness feature, such as the Data Security Programme, which provides employees with security tips on protecting DEWA’s data and systems. It also includes the Whistleblower feature so employees can report any violations or illegal acts, and the Knowledge Corner, to familiarise employees with news in different areas and publications.
DEWA also uses its Health, Safety and Environment service to inform employees about these subjects. Besides providing work-related needs, the application enables employees to find the best offers and discounts by DEWA’s partners through DEWA Store. It also helps them sell their belongings through the Souq feature.
DEWA constantly works on adding and updating the application’s services to fit the employees’ needs, including People of Determination, to keep pace with the changes of DEWA’s procedures and work environment. This helps streamline tasks. The application provides more than 197 services, with digitalisation of more than 70 procedures used by 10,000 people up to 2019. This reduced up to 15 tonnes of carbon emissions. The total number of transactions made successfully through the application has reached 8.4 million transactions and saved DEWA more than AED 37 million.
DEWA’s Employees can also request IT support by using the Khadamatech service on the Smart Office application.
The Smart Document application enables writing, documenting, and following up on official documents as well as getting the required approvals .Since DEWA’s employees can have access to Smart Document via different devices including computers and tablets, besides smart phones, Smart Document helped to reduce 84 tonnes of carbon emissions. Using this feature helped with all internal and external communication and automatization of DEWA’s procedure models, with 4,000 employees using it to provide more than 23 services.
DEWA’s smart application gives customers a smooth experience, as it combines ease and efficiency, and it shows in the way it simplifies many prerequisites into one simple step, making life easier for customers. Besides, the smart application introduces a new and innovative concept in the way it delivers services seamlessly on the home page, avoiding the hassle of searching and browsing. Once users open their home pages, they can view all DEWA’s services, such as bills, how much electricity and water they have used, and compare their use with similar buildings.
The application is compatible with global platforms such as iOS and Android, as well as on Internet of Things (IoT), such as Samsung Home Theatre Systems, Samsung Gear, Televisions, Apple watches, and eLife from Etisalat. DEWA follows the Government Services Excellence Program, approved by the Government of Dubai, which provides standards that determine the quality of services for all government institutions in Dubai. The model addresses several areas that DEWA has strived to fully implement in its smart application, including accessibility, ease of use, design, content, and functionality.
Customers made more than 9.1 million transactions on DEWA’s smart application in 2019, and saved more than AED 371 million, which reduced about 31,000 tonnes of carbon emissions. This is equal to planting more than 35,500 trees spreading over a distance equal to 67 football pitches.
DEWA’s Smart Response initiative, which it provides in 5 different languages, provides customers with information and tools to improve the availability of supply and enhance the quality of life. It provides a better customer experience by making it easier to report electricity and water technical interruptions, fixing them and simplifying the accuracy and ease of reporting. It also enables them follow-up on their report status.
The Smart Response also enables customers to do self-diagnosis using DEWA’s smart app and increasing the response rate using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Geographic Information System (GIS), Virtual Reality and automatic tasks distribution system. This is in addition to notifying customers proactively in case of potential water leakage, to verify it and take the needed action.
DEWA also provides, through the Smart Response service, the High-Water Usage Alert initiative. It helps customers discover possible leaks in their water connections, after the meter. The system sends instant notifications to the customer if there is an unusual increase in consumption, to check the internal connections and repair any leaks with the help of a specialist technician. This contributes to reducing incurred costs by limiting water wastage. The initiative reduces the ‘Recovery Average Time’ goal of minor notifications from 3 hours to 2 hours, and the major notifications from 6 hours to 4 hours.
The service saved 300 million gallons of water for customers, which is equal to more than AED 17 million. It also reduced the service costs by 23%, and the average annual saving has reached AED 800,000.
DEWA launched Rammas, DEWA’s virtual employee that uses AI to communicate in English and Arabic. It is available round the clock on DEWA’s smart app and website, as well as its Facebook page, Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, robots, and WhatsApp Business platform. DEWA is the first government organisation in the UAE to have a verified WhatsApp Business account. Rammas can continuously learn and understand customers’ needs based on their enquiries. Rammas analyses them, based on available data and information, to best respond to and streamline transactions. Since its inception in Q1 of 2017, Rammas has responded to over 3.1 million customer queries.
DEWA has a strategy for digital transactions, and was one of the first government organisations to adopt blockchain technology in a number of services and initiatives, including registering and renewing smart tenancy contracts in collaboration with Wasl Asset Management Group, Dubai Land and the Payment Reconciliation and Settlement system.
DEWA has migrated its on-premise SAP landscape to Data Hub Integrated Solutions LLC (Moro)’s Hana for corporate cloud computing, which is fully owned by DEWA. This reduced cost of data migration and enhances its speed and resilience. It is one of the world’s largest migrations to Hana in the utilities sector. It is also one of the largest data migrations in the Middle East and North Africa.
