Energy Management Software for Leading Irish Electricity Supplier

Project Overview

L&A CORPORATION developed an Energy management software for registering, storing, and processing information from electricity meters.

Our client, a leading supplier of electricity on the Irish market, is using a specialized system for registration of Electricity Meters Points at all kinds of premises, either personal residences or business properties.

Over 2 mln Meter Point Reference Numbers (MPRNs) and related data were imported and processed in the configured Dynamics CRM system. Leveraging Amazon services, the whole lifecycle of managing an end customer was covered. It starts with the sales process and meter installation and continues with registering day-to-day usage, providing comprehensive consumption charts to the premises’ owners, generating regular invoices/statements, and accepting payments.

Team and Technologies

The highly professional development team varied over time from 2 to 4 2 C# .NET software developers, a QA, and a PM who have been working on the project for 8 years and have successfully executed the Time & Material engagement model.

The technologies they applied include .NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, Bootstrap, JavaScript, MS Dynamics CRM Online 2011-365, MS SQL, Seal, XML, Nuapay, Credorax, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon Athena, Amazon S3.

Key Features of the Delivered Energy Management Software

• Managing  and processing sales in real-time

• Extensive customization within Dynamics CRM

• Reporting on various marketing aspects

• Communicating with the regulator in a real-time mode

• Providing data for the support team for tracking customer’s issues

• Managing all meter installations

• Tracking all incoming payments

• Tracking all meter readings

• Viewing customer statements and invoices

• Visibility of energy consumption to customer

• Accepting payments from various sources

Project Challenges

While designing and developing Energy management software containing an ample number of tools for enhancing sales excellence and customers’ comfort, our developers successfully solved all the challenges they faced in the process:

• Importing and managing more than 2 mln Meter Point Reference Numbers (MPRNs).

• Funneling leads and sales from different sources into a single point of processing.

• Integrating the Energy management software with credit and direct debit payment systems.

• Integrating the software with a smart meter system – topping up meters, responding to alarms, retrieving data, etc.

• Setting up real-time communication with a regulator.

• Building a solid solution for meaningful report management.

• Improving the effectiveness of meter installations and meter readings tracking.

• Automated generating of customer statements (weekly and annually) and invoices (monthly), accounted for different tariffs varying for business/domestic usage, depending on the time of day, with options of meter replacements, customers rejoining, switching tariffs, etc.

• Gathering a vast amount of half-hourly readings data to allow fine-grained tariffs depending on the time of day.

Business Value Delivered

Our Energy management software helps to control electricity usage and billing for electricity supplier company more efficiently. The processes like tracking payment from multiple sources, sales monitoring, and reporting are handled via Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online web interface. For the end customers, we developed a web portal and Web API for iPhone and Android mobile applications, providing them with relevant information and allowing making payments at hand.

Benefits of the developed Energy management software include:

• Efficient sales and payment processes;

• Thorough customized reporting;

• Accessible centralized information;

• Adherence to regulatory compliance;

• Controllable consumption and payments by end customers.

Our customer also benefits from automated communication with the existing registration system via a set of services and custom CRM plugins. Web API for retrieving data by external applications takes the usability of the system to a new level. For example, it is possible to configure automatic payment when the meter balance is lower than the threshold and thus avoid cut off.

L&A CORPORATION development team has delivered Energy management software that has not just met our customers’ expectations but also contributed to the improvement of the customer service and sales processes.