Frank has spent his entire career in the water utility business at a number for utilities in both South Carolina and Alabama. He is the Director of Utilities for Columbia Water and the City's lead on the AMI installation project. Frank also served as the Director of the South Carolina Section of AWWA.

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Josh Braman is a engineer with Jacobs and serves as the company's Implementation Lead for Smart Meters. Throughout his career, Josh has lead smart meter projects of various sizes throughout the world including Fort Walton Beach, FL, Forsyth County, GA, New Orleans, LA, and one of the world's largest installations in Singapore

Columbia Water serves customers located inside the city limits, major portions of Richland County, portions of Lexington County and other local communities. Columbia Water serves approximately 415,000 customers through approximately 150,000 water meters ranging in size from ¾” to 10”.

In 2016, Jacobs Engineering was contracted to perform a Business Case for Columbia Water assessing their current metering process and the potential benefits of implementing an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution. Following the successful completion, Columbia Water decided to pursue an AMI solution and contracted Jacobs to develop an RFP that best suited the City’s needs.

Through a rigorous solicitation and interview process, Badger Meter who had proposed a cellular AMI solution, was selected by the Columbia scoring committee as the successful vendor. Jacobs worked with Columbia Water, Badger Meter (vendor) and Utility Metering Solutions (subcontractor) to successfully deliver this project.

Jacobs initially worked with City staff to develop key project metrics and establish project procedures that would limit the impact felt by City of Columbia staff while allowing the vendor and subcontractor to install 150,000 water meters over a 3.5-year period. Weekly team meetings were held to monitor progress and budget, and monthly meetings were held to be sure City management and staff were always informed of the project’s status.

The project was successfully completed in September of 2022 as Columbia Water now has over 152,000 AMI meters installed since implementation began in March of 2019. Columbia Water are now realizing the benefits of their (approximate) $48 million dollar investment in metering infrastructure. With this new solution the City no longer has to read 150,000 meters manually on a monthly basis and can instead pull the customers billing reads from the Utility portal ‘Beacon’ provided by Badger Meter. This has greatly reduced the chance for human error, time to bill and the overall quantity of customer complaints received by the City regarding customers water bills.