Smaller Utilities Too Need Program Tracking and Reporting Analytics

The press reports covering the energy industry are focused on what the big investor-owned utilities are doing in the areas of demand-side management, Smart Grid, smart meter deployments, etc. In this breathless coverage of projects with budgets of hundreds of millions dollars, one area that is being given the short shrift is the needs of smaller utilities - Municipals and Co-Ops. Last time I checked, there were over 2,000 of such smaller utilities and many of them are active in helping their customers save on energy, reduce load, install renewable energy systems, etc - i.e., do the things the big guns are doing, but doing them quietly, without much fanfare. Given their smaller budgets, they have a stronger need for tracking, reporting and timely performance analytics so that they can get the best bang for their limited dollars.

It seems to us that they are being ignored as they don't represent big contracts for the big software companies who are used to multi-million, multi-year ERP and MIS projects. This gap was the primary motivation for us to jump in and invest the last year and half to develop a version of our E2DR® suite - DSPrime^TM - specifically targeted at this underserved market. We basically went back to the drawing board [actually the keyboard in this case!] and completely redid the original version of DSPrime we had to give the Muni's and Co-Ops the robust set of tracking, reporting and analytic dashboards that we provide to our larger customers. The key challenge was delivering it in a professionally hosted SaaS product that can meet the stringent budget constraints of this market segment.

The other requirement that we imposed on ourselves was that we wanted the user to be able to set up the programs, input the data and generate the reports without needing tech support or expensive maintenance costs. That meant we had to make the user interface very intuitive and also, provide in-depth, context-sensitve online help to guide the user through all these activities. Being overachievers, we said - what the heck, we will also develop a forum section so that users can pose questions and learn from the user community on how to do things effectively.

Then, as the head-piece, we made the pricing very simple and affordable. Overall, we are very pleased [disclaimer alert: I am not exactly objective reviewer here!] with the end result. More importantly, we are particularly proud that we were able to deliver a product that is tailor-made to meet the needs of the PMs and others working in the trenches in hundreds of Muni's and Co-Ops delivering real energy savings - kWh, Therms and Gallon savings.