The Challenge

Enabling a growing community solar business with improved sales tracking.

A leading energy provider wanted to improve scalability for their community solar business strategy, while also increasing the reliability and integrity of their data. They were experiencing technical gaps in their existing workflows due to rapid growth of the business.

The retailer engaged Credera to design and implement an internal customer relationship management tool to combat these difficulties. The tool would be responsible for tracking relations between entities generating solar power and those consuming solar power. In addition, it needed to provide invoicing and report functionality to reduce overhead incurred during standard business operations.

The Solution

Customizing internal tooling for a business’ changing needs.

Credera began with an envision phase, where we identified pain points, captured desired features, and designed user experience (UX) wireframes and prototypes of the potential solution. The team then leveraged an interactive UX prototype to gather user feedback on the solution and iterate on the design. The prototype design of the platform enabled easy viewing of all entities used by the business.

To provide tracking of their relationships, the tool moved the necessary business data from spreadsheets to a database, enforcing data to align with business rules. The provider and Credera planned for the necessary development sprints, culminating in a go-live and migration of existing community solar business data, allowing for the stakeholders to transition to the new tool immediately.

Credera worked closely with the stakeholder team throughout the development process, responding to adjustments to features for the system. By targeting feature verticals, The team delivered completed features to the stakeholders for testing, ensuring the final delivery of a tool that fit the changing needs of the business. This agile operation kept Credera and the stakeholders in lockstep throughout the project.

The Results

Improving business scalability and effectiveness through purpose-built tooling.

The energy provider now has a custom tool to enable the growth of their community solar business. This tool delivers increased business efficiency and enforcement of data validation and integrity.

With the completion of this effort, the energy provider has experienced the following:

• Increased visibility into customer data via a user-friendly user interface (UI), instead of spreadsheets with numerous tabs.

• Auto-calculation of invoice fees for customer subscriptions and automated fee recalculation when contract terms or site commitments were modified.

• Elimination of duplicate data and data sprawl because of unique database keys defined for the various community solar data entities.

• Decreased time between customer requests and delivery of answers, so the business team can now aggregate data commonly requested by customers more quickly, with actions that would previously take hours/days now available via on-demand reports.

• Security and integrity of data maintained via permissions and roles, enabling simplified onboarding of new sales personnel while maintaining broader administrator rights for sales team leadership.

• Simple UI to enable data import from non-digital channel sales to reduce sales team overhead and maintain centralized customer and developer record management.

• Scalable digital infrastructure enables rapid growth of business and customer records with UI that allows for easy addition of new entities, as well as creation of inter-relationships.