A large investor-owned electric utility in southwest United States had been implementing demand-side management programs for a few years but lacked a comprehensive and centralized system to facilitate effective program operations. Program managers needed to quickly ascertain energy efficiency program savings achieved, incentives paid, and progress towards meeting regulatory goals.
In addition to being able to better understand activities and progress towards meeting its regulatory goal, there was a desire to integrate and streamline business processes while being able to make more informed and timely decisions based on data and information.
eTRACK is a flexible and scalable demand-side management platform for program administrators and implementation contractors. It is highly customizable, cloud-based software that adapts to the unique needs of each utility. From program planning to monitoring, rebate processing, and reporting, eTRACK makes it easy to manage energy programs by facilitating streamlined project planning and development, predictive analytics that identify trends and patterns across data sets, and automated business processes that increase operational efficiencies resulting in time- and cost-savings.
For this utility, ANB leveraged standard products such as Microsoft Work Flow Foundation, Adobe Flex, and other third-party tools to enter the market in the shortest possible time. ANB’s team hit the ground running and the final product was released within less than 10 months of project initiation.
To accomplish the objectives established by the utility, ANB migrated data from the previous five years of program activity while ensuring that proper checks and balances where established for data validation, and flagging of duplicate or inconsistent information. eTRACK was also integrated with the utility’s financial system to ensure that several thousand invoices were paid out in a timely manner with superior controls to meet the most stringent requirements of financial auditors.
The eTRACK solution was used for a variety of program designs and models that include standard rebate offers, market transformation programs, and energy efficiency and load management initiatives in a single database. With consolidated information over multiple years, the utility now had new opportunities for extensive data mining and trend analysis that will facilitate effective program modifications.
Now in its seventh year of deployment, the demand-side management team at the utility continues to rely on eTRACK to provide them with the tools for managing their programs effectively.
