Enterprise Asset and Energy Management Platform for Advanced Business Analysis

Business challenge of a Fortune 500 company

Intellias has been developing a sophisticated meter data management platform for a prominent maker of distributed energy systems and intelligent building infrastructure. Featured in the Fortune Global 500 list, this company offers an integrated cloud-based solution for observing, analyzing, and regulating energy consumption of buildings. For over a decade, their smart energy data management platform has been helping corporations, hospitals, universities, and many other organizations use energy sustainably.

However, with an increasing volume of energy use data, the platform’s performance started to deteriorate, and the lack of data visualization and reporting capabilities became an acute problem. Our client asked us to build an experienced web development team that could help their in-house backend engineers rework the foundation of their legacy frontend application.

Solution delivered

Initially, Intellias supplied team members to work as part of our end client’s organization. Over the course of several months, our team evaluated the existing energy management software, analyzed new requirements, and suggested a totally different frontend architecture, both conceptually and technologically.

The new solution offered enhanced visualization and reporting capabilities and outperformed the existing system on all popular web browsers when fed twice the volume of data. Once the new design was approved, our team moved on to development and quality control.

We also provided digital platform services and developed a compelling problem statement report that considered all aspects of product implementation including development, manual/automated testing, and management. Based on this document, we worked through all roadblocks and managed to streamline the workflows throughout the whole product development cycle.

As the scope of the project expanded, our partnership evolved into a long-term cooperation. We took responsibility for developing part of the backend and making continuous enhancements to it. We now provide a full-stack team, covering all stages of development of our end client’s core product – from the business level to production. In addition, our team initiated a monthly release schedule. We’re also significantly contributing to a new technology migration strategy.

All work on this project happens within the scaled agile framework (SAFe), which is intended for large enterprises with multiple development teams. SAFe quarterly planning meetings bring together our client’s top management, business owners, and feature teams to get a unified view of the product line and energy management trends, discuss the company’s strategies, and plan new functionality.

Our team is currently working on a complex energy solution that aggregates, processes, structures, and visualizes smart meter data related to building performance, equipment health, and maintenance. The system generates custom reports in convenient visual formats for target groups.

Right now, Intellias engineers are conducting business requirements analysis, implementing the backend, and adding new functionality.

The platform’s core and new features include:

End user reports

With end users ranging from technicians to analysts and top executives, the platform provides an extensive system of detailed interactive reports that display data on management activities, maintenance, green building monitoring, and more. Interactions between different levels of users happen via tickets. For example, if a data analyst spots a malfunction, they can report it to maintainers through the ticket system.

Emailing

Our team is now implementing emailing functionality to automatically send updates on the current state of and recent changes to systems. Emailings allow users to stay posted on the latest happenings in the system without even opening it.

Fault detection

Users can analyze equipment performance data (malfunctions and faults, times of failure, downtime, etc.) based on reports for a certain period. Such failure analysis helps technicians take corrective actions and plan preventive maintenance in the future.

Billing management

We’ve developed an accounting system integration in order to collect data from meters, transmit it, and process it for billing.

Advanced localization

Our team modified the Sencha Ext JS framework to meet our client’s needs so users can make translations right in the system with a few clicks and edits.

Technologies used: JavaScript / Sencha / Angular / Highcharts / Java / AWS

Business outcome

The released product has been highly appreciated by our end client for being faster, more modern looking, more functional, and easier to use. Their high-performance energy and sustainability platform has been shipped to over 750 companies and corporations across 35 countries and controls 48,000 buildings, hundreds of thousands of data points, and billions of meter readings yearly.

Today, our collaboration is flourishing. Intellias has extended the abilities of our end client’s teams and taken over responsibility for continuous maintenance and further product development. Because of our strong technical expertise and continuous drive for improvement, many duties have been passed on to our team.

The solution we’re developing allows end clients to:

• Work with a modern and attractive frontend
• Load consumption data quickly when browsing data-intensive pages
• Analyze energy usage stats via interactive charts
• Generate reports via sophisticated data grids with advanced sorting, grouping, and pagination capabilities
• Receive data-driven insights into energy and sustainability metrics
• Increase energy efficiency and optimize facility maintenance and operations
• Reduce risk of downtime from equipment crashes
• Maximize building performance through advanced data-driven analysis
• Improve environmental conditions
• Streamline billing processes
• Ensure significant cost savings