Energy Management Platform VS. Utility Bills

Client

Energy management company founded to help businesses orient themselves in a chaotic world of utility bills.
Problem

Loss of clients to competitors pushed the energy management company to take one last step before considering bankruptcy
Solution

Fast and bug-free application that can easily onboard new clients

Client

In 2003, a US-based energy management company was founded to help businesses orient themselves in a chaotic world of utility bills. A web application they developed receives utility bills in various forms from diverse data providers. The algorithms then analyze the data and compile a report that explains to the client where they are spending, where they can save the budget, and how their utility bills will look like in the future. This business intelligence tool helps its users across the United States save both time and hundreds of thousands of dollars on utility spendings.

Problem

Loss of clients to competitors pushed the energy management company to take one last step before considering bankruptcy.

When the client reached out to Syberry in 2016, the business was unstable. The app was developing slower and was more defective than the others on the market, so the business was losing its biggest clients to competitors. In their last effort before considering bankruptcy, the client contacted us for help.

Solution

Fast and bug-free application that can easily onboard new clients

Upon taking over from the previous team, we immediately improved the system’s foundation. Migration to GitLab from outdated Team Foundation Server enhanced version control, and setting up CI/CD accelerated build times by 12x, enabling the removal of two DevOps Engineers.

We upgraded project engineering practices to industry standards, adopting agile methodologies, clean coding, and thorough documentation. This streamlined development, allowing us to deliver features and fixes every two weeks. Swift stabilization of the application eliminated 24/7 support needs.

As our client pursued a robust market strategy, we seamlessly onboarded smaller clients while engineering solutions for larger clients’ specific needs. Integration with data providers presented various challenges, resolved through API integration or data extraction algorithms with automatic validation checks.

With remarkable optimization efforts, our engineers handled scaling challenges by refining storage practices and code, dramatically improving efficiency. Notably, we introduced a carbon footprint calculation feature, aiding clients in emissions reduction and sustainability efforts.

Results
A growing enterprise that changed the businesses’ relationship with the energy management

$4M

investments raised

times profit increase since 2016

years on the market

100,000

app users

35,000

clients onboarded

Fierce Innovation Award

Challenges

Adapt to the risk of data provider withdrawal

The fierce competition on the energy management market presents a constant risk of some data providers withdrawing their integration consent. If it happens quickly, this could result in our client’s loss of data and users. To address the risk, we have prepared other tools to import the data even without integration with the data providers. This means that even if all data providers refused to work with our client, they would not lose the data or their users.

Save storage

Products using big data require increasing storage, and simply buying more servers would be as reckless as buying a new apartment instead of cleaning the old one. With the release of every new feature and data flow, we consider how it will influence the storage and look for ways to optimize it. Doing that allows our client to save their budget on servers on premises.

Key Features

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

With some data providers unable to integrate with us on the API level, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) proves to be useful to detect the data from files in PDF format. The tool helped us reduce manual invoice processing to less than 1%.

Integrations with the biggest data providers on the market

80% of the data our client imports come from just a few giants on the market. Adapting to these companies’ data structure, algorithms, and systems allowed us to seamlessly import terabytes of data each day.

Introduction of NoSQL to store big data

With the use of NoSQL databases, we were able to optimize the client’s data storage and process more data without buying additional servers.

Technologies

.NET

Javascript

Azure

Windows Communication Foundation

MS SQL

Teams

Outlook

Jira

What the Customer Says About Us

“I've been impressed by their willingness to do right by us and our customers.”

Syberry has successfully improved the frontend performance of the platform and continues to make thoughtful suggestions for enhancements. They have proven to be communicative and reliable, mitigating the common concerns of outsourced teams. Syberry remains mindful of business goals and client needs.

Cory Kowal, VP of Product