Renewable Energy Project Management Software Development for Green Energy Investments Company

Client

Our customer is an independent developer of infrastructural projects for renewable energy generation. They have offices in three locations around the world with the headquarters in Italy. Their main field of operations is the development of projects for green energy.

Project Description

As we’ve stated, the company's business is producing environmental and development projects for green energy. They reached out to us to request that we develop a project management system with ERP-like features for stage tracking and resource allocation. Elinext excels at custom ERP solutions development. Project management software development also certainly isn’t a novelty for us. Custom project management software for renewable energy is a rare find among our large number of customers. but we have plenty of projects in similar verticals..

Before integrating this system into their workflow, they used Excel and Dropbox, so it was easy to understand that they needed a better system for smoother cooperation. This new system is supposed to consolidate all the project information. That way, the data access will be granted at different levels, and lead to better cooperation. Our web app development expertise should serve right to the purpose of the project.

Challenges

The client stated all their business challenges to us, and we suggested the ways the solution that we could design would cover all of these challenges. We built the software accordingly. We were happy to add the renewable energy project management software to our portfolio.

The issues that pre-existed before the web application was delivered:

• Disorganized project tracking: everything was done on separate files for project and budget allocation and tracking, which was very ineffective
• Uncoordinated document distribution: all the project documentation was distributed and stored on Dropbox and SharePoint
• Absence of data visualisation: there were no dashboards, therefore using data for decision-making was a complicated process

These are the business objectives that were meant to be achieved with the web application. With the help of designed software, the client’s organization should be able to get the following with their new project management software for renewable energy:

• Monitoring of development phases and their progression
• Monitoring of the budgets dedicated to each development entity
• Organizing the database of technical, financial, and legal documents in a created comprehensive data room
• Organizing visualisation of project data to generate dashboards in order to aid the investment committee and other stakeholders in making well-informed decisions based on perfectly visualized data.

Process

The project was meant only for internal use within the company/ The web application is to be used by tech finance and legal specialists, project managers, and C-level managers with a total number of around 30 currently. This project management software for renewable energy is meant to serve as a single source of standardized data about internal projects of the company. 

• The first phase, discovery, with documentation and UI/UX development, was delivered during the first month of cooperation.
• The second phase - MVP Development - lasted around six months and took about 2800 man hours for its execution.
• Now we’re in Phase Three - Post-MVP adjustments and development - estimated at another 600 man hours (including the extensive share of UX/UI design services).

QA services were manual for this project, as in most cases of simple project management software development.

We used Kanban for the discovery phase, and Scrum for the latter stages. The level of collaboration with the client was pretty standard: regular calls and e-mail conversations.

Solution

Module 1: Login. 

Used for authorisation and authentication of users.

Module 2: Dashboard. 

Used for viewing the stats, budget, and schedule dashboards, allows displaying the dashboard data.

Module 3: Project management

Used for the creation of projects, inputting information, viewing and editing projects, uploading project documents, and achieving and removing projects.

Module 4: User management

Allows the following functions: synchronization with MS admin center, viewing user profile and list of users, permissions management, and deactivating user.

Module 5: Business Unit Management

Allows viewing, adding, editing and removing the business units

Module 6: Dropdown management

Enables viewing dropdown list, adding, editing and removing values

Module 7: Document repository and finance budget template manager

One can view and upload documents, and select the finance budget template with the help of this module

Module 8: Historical data

Enables historical data management

Module 9: Geographic visualization

This module helps with visualizing project location on Google Maps 

The context diagram of the solution looks like this:

Results

This is another project management software development instalment for Elinext. We aren’t delivering custom project management software for renewable energy that often, but it wasn’t our first rodeo either.

The project is currently in its post-MVP development phase. Our customer was very satisfied with the app and is currently using it in their everyday operations. As it was an internal project, and our customer needed a custom solution, at a post-MVP version of an app we’re only adding the features that our client finds fit so it would satisfy their needs at 100% rate.

We’re currently working on improvements and enchantments based on system usage, and are certain that if this customer needs any projects in the future, it’s highly unlikely that they are going to find another vendor as currently, we’re performing all the needed work within the timeframe and allocated budget. We’re eager to help any company that needs renewable energy project management software for its external or internal needs.