The Client’s Challenge
Retail energy companies service business and residential customers with a variety of energy sources. The wholesale departments of these companies are challenged with determining the best means of providing a profitable source of energy to different customers.
In order to most accurately project future demand of energy generation, energy traders analyze usage models and consumption history, match up market prices, and use this data to drive decisions to buy or sell. These decisions can make a significant difference to the overall profitability of a Retail Energy business.
They were using a rudimentary system that wasn’t streamlined, intuitive, or easy for the trading team to use effectively. This resulted in the business coming up with alternative ways to make impactful decisions. They needed a more efficient means of integrating and interfacing with data to standardize business practices and maintain data integrity.
The Request
The Spinakr Crew was brought on to upgrade and enhance the user interface that connected the wholesale energy traders with multiple data sources. Most traders are accustomed to working with large complex spreadsheets. They need flexibility to model, forecast, trend, and easily evaluate data in order to make decisions in the best interest of the company.
In this case, they needed a single web based application with excel-like capabilities to be able to synthesize large amounts of data quickly and easily.
The objective of this project was to present information in a format that was familiar to the traders while providing better integrity of data and information, in as near real-time as possible, in order to make better financial decisions and provide the greatest degree of confidence of profitability.
Understanding the needs and challenges of the business, as well as the user audience is critical.
We take a collaborate and “listening” approach to truly understand the scope and objective of the project, and be able to deliver a successful outcome.
In this case, we gained critical insight to understand energy wholesaling and reselling: how they buy, what information is needed, how they consume information, and what actions they need to take.
Knowing that energy wholesaling traders are highly analytical and comfortable using comprehensive, complex spreadsheets, we created an interface with UI/UX that they were familiar and comfortable with. We enhanced it with features that made it easier to consume information at a glance, and ultimately empowered them to make quicker, more data-driven decisions.
The Execution
Like most of our projects, we followed an agile development and project management method: a collaborative, iterative approach that incorporates continuous testing and responsiveness to change.
This agile methodology, with daily cadence meetings and shorter development cycles (called sprints), made us flexible, adaptable and helped us produce results and deliver iterations quickly and often. This approach allows greater involvement from each stakeholder, to manage the project together and provide the greatest amount of value in the least amount of time.
Staff augmentation and bringing the right people together to work collectively as one team is one of our greatest strengths.
This project required a very collaborative approach and many different disciplines to deliver the right outcome.
Our Integrated Project Team
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