Power Factors Works with Citizen39 to Amp Up Report-Creation Abilities, Delighting Its Customers
Power Factors provides owners and operators of wind, solar and energy storage assets with mission critical enterprise software for asset performance management, commercial asset management, workflow management and analytics, helping them optimize asset performance and maximize portfolio profits.
The company—headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with offices around the world—does this by capturing and analyzing raw data from renewable energy assets and turning that data into actionable insights for owners, operators, and asset managers.
However, until 2020, Power Factors was not always able to provide those insights in exactly the way some customers preferred. This limitation was no small matter to Power Factors, since helping customers succeed is a cornerstone of the company’s mission to develop software that accelerates the global energy transition by empowering all renewable energy stakeholders to collaborate, automate critical workflows, and make the best decisions.
In searching for a solution, Power Factors determined that its existing data infrastructure needed to undergo reconfiguring to support more flexible reporting. The company also realized that an endeavor of such potential complexity would require highly specialized expertise.
It was then that Power Factors decided to contact Citizen39.
In short order, Citizen39—led by Paul Patterson—brought the positive results Power Factors hoped to receive, reflected by increased levels of customer satisfaction.
“Paul did a very good job positioning us to meet the reporting needs of our customers,” says Robert Johnston, Power Factors’ Vice President of Customer Success. “Thanks to Paul and Citizen39, we now have a clearer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to aggregating our underlying data sources into a presentation layer. Paul also helped us become more nimble, giving us more bandwidth to focus on other aspects of our business.”
Flexibility in Reporting was Crucial
In 2020, Power Factors’ Drive platform helped customers manage over 35 gigawatts of wind, solar and energy storage assets worldwide. The company’s need for greater flexibility in its reporting became more acute in September 2020, the month Power Factors introduced a new product called Drive Pro—which the company describes as “the most advanced asset performance management platform available for renewable energy assets.”
According to Power Factors, Drive Pro provides “innovative tools to identify and recover plant performance losses to maximize portfolio profitability. Early results indicate it is capable of capturing 2 to 5 percent of incremental performance from PV power plants, which potentially represents significant reductions in costs for the typical solar facility.”
Drive Pro accomplishes this by cleansing the imperfect, noisy data it collects from solar assets and then automatically detecting and prioritizing recoverable performance losses.
Consequently, it is imperative that Power Factors be able to present refined and fully analyzed data in many different contexts following procurement through Drive Pro and the company’s other products, Johnston indicates.
“These are operational reports, so in some cases customers might be looking to compare projected production versus actual production—the same with revenues,” he says. “Mainly, customers need reports to reveal opportunities where energy yield could be increased from those assets.”
The challenge for Power Factors prior to Citizen39 entering the picture was having to work with a reporting infrastructure configured to provide a fairly narrow subset of reports, Johnston explains.
“The data were trustworthy, and we had no difficulty making sense of them. What we needed was better report configurability. The barrier to that was having timely data on a consistent basis. We needed to be able to make sure that the data continually refreshed properly in order to reflect the full datasets.”
Citizen39 was Recommended for the Job
From the start, Citizen39 was able to propose a battery of solutions to overcome these challenges.
“One of Paul’s suggestions we implemented was the creation of a report engine that could leverage our tabular model as well as our SaaS and REST API data sources,” says Johnston. “Other suggestions of his included running Microsoft Azure SQL and SSRS paginated reports through Power BI.”
Paul Patterson came to the attention of Powers Factors in late 2019 on the recommendation of a company employee who had worked with him in a previous capacity.
“Our colleague told us about Paul’s expertise and said he felt confident that Paul would be able to help us,” Johnston recalls. “So, we reached out to him and began having discussions.”
Johnston says that among the strengths Patterson brought to the table was an ability to examine a situation from all angles and propose solutions that made solid sense.
“We presented to Paul our use case and oriented him to the datasets and the types of reports we were looking for,” says Johnston. “Paul got the picture very quickly and lost no time in mapping out the reporting frameworks necessary to achieve our goals.
“We also were appreciative that Paul identified hidden issues and offered solutions to those as well.”
Johnston also credits Patterson with being a conscientious data consultant and service provider.
“Paul was very responsive to our requests, which resulted in a great working experience,” he says. “Part of Paul’s value is his range of expertise, which allows him to brainstorm outside-the-box solutions. He offers an abundance of good ideas. And he’s consistent in his execution—in other words, what he says he will do he does.
“For us, Paul was clearly a good choice.”