Solar Operations in the Era of Digital Transformation

In this article, we’ll explore how adopting solar asset management software can transform your solar business operations. We will discuss assessing your current workflow, and how to upgrade to a holistic solar asset management solution. Additionally, we’ll highlight how rapidly growing solar organizations leverage new solar software like FutrOS to outpace their competition.

The term mPMA, or mobile Process Management & Automation, represents a new category of solar software designed to enhance the productivity of distributed, remote, and field teams. Some of the anticipated changes include the ongoing movement towards remote, mobile, and multi-organizational workforces, where mPMA is especially crucial. It minimizes soft costs and expenses and improves resources by consolidating communication; avoiding redundancies and scattering of data and files; and integrating backup systems to screen for lost and late file updates.

Here for example, we will describe what is, what for, where from, who by, and how to use automation in your solar business, offer more tools and sources, and give you some saving calculators. By the end, you’ll understand how to automate operations and why most organizations can achieve full optimization of their solar asset management within four to five weeks.

The Solar Energy Sector is Experiencing Rapid Growth

This situation in the solar industry also points to the fact that many of these companies are fast becoming a victim of localization.

Although, from the year 2013 to the year 2021, data has it that the number of solar installers increased to double. There has however been an account of high disruption in the year 2020 owing to the prevailing pandemic but as per records, the residential solar market only had a rise of 7% and for the year 2021, the growth is even expected to be virtually doubled. Also, the Solar ITC has recently been extended for an additional two years and, overall, analysts have predicted that there will be additional solar installations worth 17% between 2021 and 2025. It is worth noting that the solar sector is quite reliable and the demand for the same is expected to rise even in the future. Further, estimates suggest that the number of installations of solar power by 2030 could be four times higher than at present.

Rapid growth does have its string of challenges as mentioned below. The lack of jobs and unemployment remains a critical problem in one of the most promising areas of solar energy. Across solar’s value chain, installation companies and their service providers irrespective of their size are witnessing perennial challenges in attracting and retaining workforce, particularly the technicians, operations managers, and field crews. Therefore, photovoltaic companies can only achieve rather modest levels of growth if they try to rely on the expansion of their staff alone.

Solar Industry Demand for Digital Transformation in Renewable Energy

The challenge is no longer about generating sales but about enhancing project effectiveness. There’s a substantial market demand, with many projects underway. Innovative operations are adapting to manage increased volume effectively, employing complex solar project management software and solar energy software.

In conclusion, the difficulty is not in driving sales anymore but in the effectiveness of the projects in the solar industry. This is not the case anymore since there is adequate and even a massive market demand which can be perceived from the flood of projects being accomplished. Innovative operations having realized this issue have already begun adjusting how their solar operations will be in a position to manage more and ensure the accomplishment of the projects.

As they grow rapidly, some solar installers and service providers have therefore employed project affiliations requiring complex solar project management software and other mPMA tools. The above tools are ideal for solar field and office personnel or students studying renewable energy.

Unlike generic customer relationship management or project management platforms, these new solar software solutions are specifically designed for the industry. They come with templates for faster, more efficient processes, integrating various business applications and facilitating better information sharing among field and office staff, as well as external subcontractors.

Is your solar project management system prepared for expansion?

Here are three questions to assess the readiness of your solar operations: Here are three questions to assess the readiness of your solar operations:

1. Solar Installation Project Management Readiness: If order rates continue to remain high in the following year, how sure are you that your solar operations can manage the incoming projects, which could triple or even double?
2. Solar Service / O&M Readiness: What genetic modifications would you have to apply when using resources for service work orders when it can be two to three times more than what is at present?
3. Solar Software Stack Readiness: To what extent are you and your team and other professionals meeting project and service delivery targets using the available collection of software and tools? Just how are these tools integrated?

Indications That mPMA (mobile work process management and automation) Is the Right Fit for Your Solar Operations

mPMA (mobile Process Management & Automation) is a new approach to increase the efficiency of the work of distributed, remote, and IoT-based teams with the help of FutrOS App. FutrOS Solar is a company that is a market leader in this category and proposes a way to manage and implement solar project management and services functions. From our experience, solar businesses are ready for workflow automation for solar with mPMA technology when they meet at least three of these criteria:

1. High Project Volume

 Meeting the performance targets of 15 or more solar installation projects or 50 or more service work orders per month. It is, however, a fact that as the process complexity increases, the simple tools are no longer useful, and this leads to such activities as working manually, inputting data twice, and handing it over to other people. This stage often leads to an understanding that there is a need for the improvement of the current system.

2. Growth Challenges

Current processes are inadequate to adapt to the need for growth. Your team members may have increased frequency of handoffs, truck rolls, and manual processes which suggest that existing systems cannot handle increased business volumes.

3. Talent Shortage

Lack of talent to be able to source more talents to fill important positions within the various departments of the company. This means that the solar industry has a 26 percent employee turnover rate, and this is why automation is crucial for meeting new and previous contracts. FutrOS helps teams get more work done faster, and the current team can get up to 35-50 percent more work done.

4. Time Constraints

Even though everyone is occupied in the workplace, the issue of time constraints in the implementation of new software shows that there is room for enhancement. Managers face a choice: In other words, the business has to turn down other business opportunities or try to change the ways it is running its operations. However, all-in-one software solutions such as CRM implementations that span multiple months seem unrealistic.

5. Dedicated Implementation Effort

One of the team members, for example, can commit about 4 hours per week for 1-2 months to work closely with the existing customer success team that supports the mPMA software provider. This person will be able to offer recommendations, look at configurations, and be involved in the training process. Using generic CRM or project management tools requires a setup time of approximately 5-10 times longer than with FutrOS ’s solar-specialized platform, which is preloaded with Futr’s App templates and can be up and running in 4-5 weeks. FutrOS’s solar asset management software offers faster setup compared to traditional CRM tools.

FutrOS – Best Service Providers to Manage Projects Successfully

As the premier mPMA platform, FutrOS eliminates or greatly minimizes clipboard entry, constant prompting, transferring of tasks, as well as mistakes that require redoing and revisiting sites. This increases efficiency and also customer satisfaction and results in better retention of talent and acquisition of good talent.

FutrOS ’s architecture organizes every project into discrete parts of tasks called Work Apps. Work Apps produce work units referred to as FutrOSs which are self-contained and can be executed independently across a remote setup. FutrOS contains data descriptions, procedural directions and tutorials (also in videos), and slots for uploading data, documents, images, and other works related to an installment or service process for every phase of a visit. This does not create the problem of having constant data overloads as found in traditional CRMs or old project management systems where individuals have to scroll through numerous tabs and features to get what they want.

Due to flexibility in FutrOS, drafting tasks for subcontractors is possible while having full control over your organization’s procedures. This approach helps one to expand his capacity problem to the labor constraint because as you grow larger you will reach areas with limited human capital.

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