Project Title: OpACT Solar Business Operations Analytics 
Funding Opportunity: SunShot Technology to Market (Incubator 10)
SunShot Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: Pleasanton, CA
Amount Awarded: $449,671
Awardee Cost Share: $185,889
Project Investigator: Deep Chakraborty
ENACT is developing an end-to-end, operational workflow analytics platform to further expedite sales and installation of solar photovoltaic (PV) projects. Adding workflow analytics enables solar developers and installers to gain ‘live’ functional guidance during project sales and delivery, leveraging data analytics that reduces human error and adds insights that help decision-making. The end result will be to provide business process automation and benchmarking for all critical workflow steps for both residential and commercial solar installations.
Approach
A typical solar project involves a series of complex workflow steps starting with customer acquisition, energy and financing analytics, and moving through design, installation and servicing – with over 150 different data points for each project. ENACT’s current workflow automation platform is already being used by hundreds of solar developers and installers, which leads to platform data for such projects. ENACT’s OpACT Analytics platform will allow users analyze all such data, providing targeted operational insights to solar developers on business process improvements. Such analytics-based insights will not only leverage the company’s internal data, but also benchmark against the top performers in their respective categories.
Innovation
OpACT Analytics will offer guided insights on all sales origination steps like customer pricing and savings estimation, equipment or financing option selections, and utility rate choices. In addition, OpACT will allow companies to automate operational processes and asset management and servicing tasks, while enabling companies to compare themselves to regional and national benchmarks on a live, anonymized basis. As thousands of new entrants join the growing solar industry in new markets where solar becomes economical, OpACT Analytics will make it easier for companies to onboard sales and operational staff and keep operating costs more manageable – all of which help to lower the soft-cost of solar.