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Universal Mind and EnerNOC Help Customers Boost Energy Efficiency and Bottom-line Results
Web-based applications, and a portal framework to house them, help EnerNOC boost customer satisfaction and increase sales
Challenge
EnerNOC’s EfficiencySMART™ applications and services suite collects energy consumption data to help commercial, institutional, and industrial facilities and translates that data into actionable energy management recommendations designed to reduce their costs through more efficient facilities-management practices. Initially, the EnerNOC team compiled customers’ charts and recommendations manually and delivered them monthly in PDF form or printed energy scorecards. But the team quickly realized that it wanted to provide customers with near-real-time insight into the effectiveness of its programs. “At the time, EfficiencySMART did not have any customer-facing technology components,” says Terry Sick, EnerNOC’s Vice President of Advanced Technology. “The manual scorecards took time to produce, and they didn’t give our customers immediate visibility into all of the ways we were saving them money.”
At the same time, EnerNOC’s DemandSMART™ comprehensive demand response application offered a manual workflow for its Price Response program, which offers customers the opportunity to get paid to reduce energy usage when energy prices rise. “Price Response was in high demand,” says Sick, “but the manual process made it difficult to scale our offering and provide customers with self-service capabilities.” Determined to boost customer satisfaction and drive sales with more compelling products, Sick and team decided to create web-enabled dashboards and modules that would allow customers to view forecasted revenue during periods of high energy prices and give them direct, immediate feedback when they did participate.
The team decided to begin addressing these challenges by creating a portal framework that could house the EfficiencySMART and DemandSMART applications as well as additional modules over time. This portal, which would become the foundation for providing customer value from the combination of EnerNOC’s applications, was deliberately designed to drive EnerNOC’s bottom line results. They needed the initial project to serve as a model for subsequent client applications within EnerNOC. The company called Universal Mind.
Process
For the first application, as well as the four others they developed for EnerNOC over the next 18 months, Universal Mind’s User Experience (UX) team started with a thorough discovery process to ensure that the resulting applications would meet EnerNOC customers’ needs. “The design process was great,” says Hugh Scandrett, EnerNOC’s Vice President of Engineering. “Two of Universal Mind’s UX specialists came onsite to run brainstorming sessions, think through concepts with us, and create some simple sketches. Then they went back and their team refined the concepts, and they delivered design compositions via a project management system that let us give feedback and iterate quickly.”
EnerNOC executives also appreciated Universal Mind’s depth of expertise in complex technological subjects. In one example, EnerNOC needed a module to perform sophisticated data charting. It had to pull large amounts of data from EnerNOC’s data warehouse into a client charting application, and it had to do it in a fluid manner so that users could quickly zoom in on a multi-day chart to see intraday data, or drag the chart to quickly move around in time. “Our old charting process was slow, and it wasn’t all that interactive,” says Sick. “We wanted those transitions to be as smooth as possible so our customers wouldn’t have to wait around for data to populate the chart. It was a complex technical challenge, but Universal Mind helped design a mechanism for paging data so that even if the customer is looking at a chart of hourly data for a given month, a full year of data is there in the browser behind the scenes, waiting to be visualized.”
Universal Mind was able to provide a complete package of client application design and development services to meet EnerNOC’s business objectives. “From a development perspective, the quality of their product is always high, it meets our needs, and it works efficiently,” Sick says.
Result
The applications have generated terrific customer feedback, and EnerNOC sales personnel now showcase the applications’ capabilities to potential customers during sales presentations. “Universal Mind created the first build of all of these tools, and even through our continuing internal development, the fundamental code and design DNA is still there,” Scandrett says. “These are technologically groundbreaking products, and Universal Mind always delivers high quality results.”
