Hexing established ten overseas subsidiaries, five regional headquarters and five overseas factories over the past twenty six years in order to realize the industry value chain analyze the existing challenges and co-create value with global utilities. This is the key to understand the customer’s pain points and offer appropriate solutions to boost the operational efficiencies, minimize OPEX and generate more revenue for the utilities. 

Hexing offers a comprehensive portfolio together with variety of business models to meet the requirements of different markets. This ensures a sustainable business platform for global utilities through the smart management of the energy flow, data flow and cash flow. 

During last decade, several utilities implemented prepaid conventional meters in order to mitigate non-technical losses. 

As the first Chinese company to offer STS-certified prepaid meters, Hexing always plays a significant role in developing features and functions of the standardized energy vending infrastructures including meter and system. Over the years, many prepaid metering projects were initiated in form of pilots, and eventually led to the national rollout in several countries due to the satisfactory outcomes and supports of the energy regulators. Nevertheless, conventional prepayment is yet to fulfill all potential capabilities of a flawless energy vending solution! It helps to eliminate bad debts, mitigate collection losses, enhance the cash flow and minimize meter reading and bill generation costs, and many more benefits but still conventional metering platform is vulnerable to tampering and fraud. Furthermore, utilities neither can send a remote command to connect or disconnect the relays, nor do they have a clue about the real time status of the conventional prepaid meters. The manual credit top-up and token transfer failure are other drawbacks of conventional prepaid meters that may affect the operational expenditures of the utilities. In addition to all above mentioned challenges, conventional prepaid solutions may not provide adequate and real time data to support financial audits. HEXING’s Smart Prepayment Solution incorporates cutting edge technology of online prepaid meters with an advanced energy vending system. The state-of-the-art solution is designed in a way to support variety of communication mediums.

Following images vividly illustrate the evolution of prepayment system from a convention toward a smart platform. 

Figure 1 - Conventional Prepayment Solution

Figure 2 - Smart Prepayment Solution

According to the Figure 1 , in conventional metering solution the consumer should manually transfer the token into the prepaid meters, while the smart prepayment solution as illustrated in Figure 2 offers real time and bidirectional data exchange between vending system and online meters. The solution supports variety of communication mediums such as PLC, RF, GPRS/3G/4G, NB-IoT and LoRa. 

Hexing’s smart prepayment solution adds all advantages of AMI to the energy vending platform. As the result, token transfer process could be done automatically and the chance of human error is totally eliminated. Furthermore, utilities access to detailed status such as active and reactive power consumption, on a real time basis. 

Followings are the key benefits of smart prepayment solution:

--Comply with the latest STS standard 

--Supports both Unit Transfer Specification (UTS)  and Currency Transfer Specification (CTS) 

--Dynamic tariff structure (TOU, flat rate, step, etc.)

--Adjustable electric charge plan based on tariff indexes, VAT, demand, service fees, etc.

--Abundant debt categories (one-off, percent, time, day, month, etc.)

--Standard interface to support all 3rd party service providers.

--Various vending channels including POS, WEB, ATM, APP, SMS, Scratch card, etc.

--Integration with AMI provides additional features such as remote token transfer, checking status, remote command, etc.

--Switchable between prepayment and post payment modes , on demand .

--Power consumption gap analysis (to compare purchased token units with real consumption on monthly and annual basis).

--Premium anti-tamper feature to realize tampering event, report it immediately and conduct analysis for further actions.

The pictorial below is an attempt to summarize all important features of Hexing’s Smart Vending System : 

Figure 3 - Features of Hexing's Smart Vending System

Hexing has implemented several smart prepayment projects in different countries. Followings are two samples among many others:

In the Dominican Republic – Hexing implemented an intelligent cluster metering project with plug and play smart prepaid meters, smart meter box and Lora communication technology to ensure the success of this project. 

In South Africa- Hexing offered IEC keypad meter and data concentrator to communicate via   PLC as the optimum solution due to several technical considerations.

About Hexing 

Hexing is a multi-national company founded in 1992 with a proven track-record in more than 90 countries across the globe. Hexing’s mission is to deliver innovative high-quality products, solutions and services to the worldwide utilities. Hexing’s business areas include meter to cash, distribution automation, distributed generation, as well as operation and service. Over the past twenty six years, Hexing demonstrated an aggressive growth toward being a world-class solution provider by hiring global talents, leveraging manufacturing process with the help of new technologies as well as massive investment on research and development.

“The meters and associated accessories has been installed running successfully with good condition which totally meets our essential requirements and we are satisfied with the quality of Hexing’s meters and system and the timely services “

-----Satisfaction of Barqi Tojik  for Meter to Cash  Project Implemented by Hexing