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Case Study
Ampion
Ampion helps make a clean and sustainable future a reality with renewable energy available to everyone. Originating from Bar Harbor, Maine, the company aimed to support the renewable energy sector, and we pulled the trigger on their idea. The solution was to design and construct a new SaaS platform providing operators tools to run community solar farms and other distributed energy generation facilities.
Sustainability
2015-2016
Services
Business Strategy
Experience Design
Agile Development
Software Architecture Design
Technology Used
AngularJS
Ruby on Rails
Internet of Things
Client feedback
“The product we started building together only a year ago is about to explode in a big way!”
Ampion Software Product Manager
Challenges
No online invoicing & lack of automated bill payment.
Ampion faced the need to switch from outdated invoicing software and introduce automated bill payments to increase the effectiveness of its work.
Inadequate power production visualizations.
The company needed to create a power production visualization to see how the energy is imported and produced or where the energy is consumed.
A need to provide operational monitoring tools.
Operational monitoring tools had to help track the system's status to get updates about the earliest warning of failures to improve them.
Solutions
The use of agile practices to design, build and launch the product on time.
With the help of agile practices, the process went utterly automated to help administrators reliably collect customer payments and be alerted to any potential issues on time.
The Internet of Things used to populate the platform.
The platform was populated using Internet of Things (IoT) technology, collecting data from devices monitoring output and other solar arrays' attributes.
Training and detailed documentation.
We provided training and detailed documentation so the Ampion team could more quickly ramp up a team to help them support their new product.
Results
Hire usAngularJS frontend paired with a Ruby on Rails back-end system.
We designed an AngularJS front end paired with a Ruby on Rails back-end system integrated with a credit card and ACH gateways for billing and collections, including a sophisticated backup protocol.
Enhanced work optimization.
By offering billing, collections, allocation, monitoring, and analytics features, Ampion provided a back-office operational platform so users could operate efficiently and compete with much larger utilities.
Machine-to-machine (M2M) interface.
We designed a machine-to-machine (M2M) interface using the cellular network to transmit this data back to the cloud for analysis.
