Case Study: CESC, Kolkata's power utility, achieves faster outage response and nearly 50% reduction in power losses with Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division

CESC Ltd. Uses GIS for Better Utility Network Planning and Operations Management

CESC, the long-standing power distributor in Kolkata serving 2.7 million residential and 2,000 industrial customers, faced the challenges of rapidly growing urban demand, a dense and mixed underground/overhead network, and the need for detailed asset mapping to ensure high availability. To modernize from hand-drawn maps and improve network planning and outage response, CESC partnered with Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division to deploy utility GIS and network model management software.

Hexagon's Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial Division migrated CESC’s landbase and field assets into a near real-time GIS, integrated it with network operations, and enabled automatic meter reading across ~1,500 transformers plus web-based visualization. The deployment cut average response time from four hours to under one hour, reduced power loss from 23% to 12%, improved fault identification and route planning, and helped detect theft—delivering measurable operational and customer-satisfaction gains.

CESC

Rahul Das

Senior Engineer