We converted millions of energy usage data points to visually consumable analyses.
Our client is an industry pioneer with over two decades of experience in energy management and sustainability services for hundreds of enterprises worldwide, including several Fortune 100 companies. They offer unique programs and services to help their customers navigate the volatility and diversity of the global energy markets. The client’s deep market expertise and technology solutions enable them to be pioneers at helping their customers view energy and sustainability challenges strategically and to make fact-based decisions supporting their financial and operational priorities.
Since Expeed Software has been retained as their strategic partner for the last 10+years to provide end-to-end solutions, they presented us with a unique challenge they were facing. They wanted a platform that could unify all the millions of data they have collected over the years about energy consumption patterns and present analytical data that could be used to suggest sustainable energy programs.
Through their energy management services offering, our client had accumulated a wealth of data regarding their customers’ energy needs, usage and spending. They then wanted to convert all of the data into meaningful information, insight and services in the fast-emerging Sustainability practices area. For this, they wanted several secure and scalable technology solutions to streamline data collection, analyse the vast amounts of data being collected, and securely disseminate the resulting information on a periodic and on-demand basis to the respective clients as well as to automate reporting of the customers’ sustainability practices and progress to various governmental and non-governmental entities providing regulatory oversight in the space. They also wanted to develop automated solutions for their customers to capture their sustainability-related goals, facilitate decision making regarding short and long-term initiatives that would help achieve those goals.
Problems That Needed To Be Addressed
The client database used vastly different energy data collection processes by customers, ranging from manual entry to automated data feeds resulting in a lack of data integrity. There were also tremendous disparities in business practices, scale and sophistication of operations among the customer base.
The Solutions We Provided
Expeed team analysed the functional and system requirements for the solution and came up with overall solution architecture and design approaches for the various functional groups. The solution delivery was creatively structured into a program with several concurrent projects deftly managed and executed in close collaboration with the client team.
The Impact and Long-term Results
Our platform has helped the client translate many years worth of data into sustainable energy action points which they are using in collaboration with other organizations and the government to put in place sustainable energy practices and products. As their strategic partner, the team at Expeed continues to add features to their platform increasing efficiency and ease of operation.
A module was created to help customers track their carbon emissions and maintain any caps either self-imposed or government-imposed on the corporation.
So, Here’s How We Did It
Dashboard: A rich, user-customizable responsive dashboard interface was created to present the results of the data analysis. Based on their role & permission level, each user had access to standard results as well as the ability to personalize their views to include the most relevant information using an expansive library of widgets tailored to show energy usage, cost and other metrics information.
Business Analytics: This module was created to enable customers to slice and dice details of their energy consumption, carbon footprint by various dimensions such as locations, divisions and compare the data from different locations.
Emission Tracking: This module was created to track different scientific emission factors required to calculate emissions such as carbon, methane that are generated by the consumption of energy from different sources. This helps customers to track their emissions and maintain any caps either self-imposed or government imposed on the corporation. This involves very complex calculations and aggregations of data on the fly.
Interval Data Module: As part of the energy management, it was also required to be able to track energy consumption at 15-minute intervals to be able to provide better insight into energy consumption and also provide a notification mechanism to spot the problems. This results in huge savings for the customers when there is any problem in their manufacturing plants or any other facility where energy is turned on by mistake.
Integration with Energy Star®: Energy Star is a government agency that certifies buildings and equipment that is energy efficient. To be able to achieve and maintain that certification, customers are required to feed their energy consumption details to Energy Star application on regular basis. Since our client is tracking energy consumption for buildings of their clients anyway, this module was developed to provide integration with Energy Star and also provide reporting of details from Energy Star. This also involves complex batch programming where energy consumption is fed on a regular basis and results are pulled back from Energy Star.