How we helped an energy consulting company launch a cloud app to streamline operations and reporting?

The client is a US-based facility management firm that consults businesses on matters about energy efficiency in a building or facility.

The client’s team performs on-site energy audits for HVAC, refrigeration, electricity, and other technical aspects. They also performed commissioning, retro-commissioning, and efficiency audits for high-end facilities.

Before launching an app, most of the audit, verification, and reporting happened manually, wasting time and energy. Team WebsOptimization helped them launch a cloud app for field technicians and a cloud solution for clients to optimize the entire value chain and workflow.

The client had long-term commissioning and audit projects that involved on-site visits. The field technicians had to take pictures of the assets, compile notes, and put all the information into an excel sheet after returning to the office.

The manual nature of the reporting was prone to human errors. The lack of a streamlined operational workflow meant that data would sometimes be lost in transfer/process.

Based on their audit, the actual work process would begin. This involved the assignment of a contractor to handle issues, recommend optimizations, and fix the problems. The team did a final inspection and verification for compliance and quality control.

During the entire process, all reporting and optimizations were managed manually, which meant the process required at least 2-3 months to complete.

During the entire tenure, a team would have to be available on-site, which was a huge hurdle to reporting due to the sheer size of paperwork, manual data entry, and management.

The technical nature of the audit, validations, and inspections meant that every module of an app had to be carefully vetted by an industry expert. All this while ensuring that a functional solution is deployed at the earliest, as per the requirement.

Team WebsOptimization took some time to get detailed briefs about the entire optimization process from the client. Based on insights, business requirements, and the bottlenecks of the process, a project/workflow management system was developed in the form of a cloud web application.

The system helped the client digitize every step of the complex process through a host of features, including:

• Event log that allowed field technicians to report findings during audit supported by photos.
• Intelligent business rules and logic to assist users in reporting any issue or addressing any recommendation.
• User assignment features to assign each issue/problem to a particular team member.
• Automatic recommendation feature that suggests/generates a list of issues to be resolved at the time of commissioning.
• Offline photos feature with automatic sync on network restoration to allow technicians to capture photos and save them on the device in case of low connectivity on site.
• Onboarding external vendors, contractors, or companies to assign tasks based on audit.
• Automatic notifications to contractors post completion of audit that shares a list of ‘tasks to be done’, ‘issues’, and ‘recommendations’.
• Task status update feature with photos to share work progress in real time.
• Issue log and status reporting for project admin to understand the workflow, assignment, and contractor duties/completed tasks.
• Automatic notification to contractors in case of reopening of certain tasks.
• PDF reports of commissioning tasks done/issues resolved along with detailed charts.
• End-user dashboard (for clients of the client) to review project progress in real-time.