With years of experience in distributing solar hardware, Deep Chakraborty, CEO, ENACT Systems noticed bottlenecks around sales, operations, workflow, and customer experience for solar energy projects. The energy service providers including solar panel installation companies and project developers were witnessing poor results in sales and investing huge amounts in soft costs. To cost-effectively address the complications for energy services stakeholders, Chakraborty conceptualized the idea of a single end-to-end software platform for accelerating sales, financing and operations."At the start, the platform focused on sales processes and later, we incorporated additional modules like analytics, financing, and operations to make the business of delivering solar energy services more efficient," begins Chakraborty. Today, the platform is focusing on reducing the solar soft costs - which make up over 50 percent of the total deal - while improving the clients' engagement with the stakeholders including financial institutions.

ENACT's platform is a cloud-based solutions hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It allows solar project developing companies to instantly create solar proposals for domestic and commercial purposes. "A unique aspect of the platform is that our customers can start developing with any address as we have the data of energy utility rates for almost every zip code in the Americas," says Chakraborty. The platform also includes an analytics engine that gives rapid and accurate financial analysis encompassing energy production, savings, cash flows, and other critical financial outputs.

"Furthermore, the platform provides developers with the tools to model energy usage for homes and businesses," says Chakraborty. Post modeling, the user can estimate the energy consumption, check the solar project visually, and ensure if the solar production is generating revenue and savings. "This is a valuable step in the process, especially home or business owners who not only like to see the project developed but also verify energy savings projections," says Chakraborty.

In tandem with project monitoring, ENACT's platform helps its users by integrating the finance option where the customers can pick and choose loans and other funding opportunities from different organizations. After the project is funded, it is transitioned seamlessly from sales to operations teams. This allows the operations team to manage projects through site surveys and obtain permits for installing solar projects. In addition, the clients gain visibility to the on-site work if the installations are done by contractors. When the solar panel and systems are installed completely, the platform is integrated with monitoring providers to gain live feeds on the generation of energy. The financial engine of the platform is designed to handle processes for consumer credit underwriting, contractor fees, and payments and tax credits.

Traditionally, tasks involved right from the stage of getting a proposal to its completion are mostly time-consuming. With ENACT's solar business platform, organizations can save time and revenue while ensuring minimum chances of errors. For instance, Nuance Energy, a company that provides solar energy solutions for farmers to run pumps for irrigation had experienced productivity loss due to its spreadsheet-based approach. "They were facing difficulties in terms of running energy calculations on Excel with all the different electric meters," says Chakraborty. With the solar business platform on-board, the client was able to calculate the complex energy parameters in minutes.