The Power of Connection: The Benefits of an Integrated Approach

If you lead an energy services organization, you know the game is about making your team operationally excellent to keep up with the pace and rigor of the energy transition boom. Like other innovators, you’ve needed to focus on transforming your business model by leveraging digital technologies to enable efficiency, improve precision, and set your team apart from the competition.

When it comes to business software, company and organization leaders have long dreamed of adopting one central system that perfectly matches the unique workflows and nuances of their operations. Energy service companies have recently discovered that comprehensive platforms like SnapCount can accommodate much of their project development and deployment work from audit to as-built. However, with the explosion of diverse digital solutions from CRM to instant messaging, to accounting and ERP, workers have struggled with data re-entry and labor-intensive and time-consuming digital hand-offs. 

If you and your team members have battled with too many disconnected apps, read on to discover the power of integration. 

Why Integrate?

For companies in the energy retrofit and sustainability space, the opportunity to integrate specialized tools with essential business systems is game-changing. By linking your energy retrofit platform with core business applications like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), accounting, financial tools, and collaborative systems, you can unlock greater efficiency, deeper insights, and smoother workflows.

Imagine an energy service company trying to keep up with growing project demand. Minimizing touchpoints and time-consuming hand-offs goes a long way in helping them turn project work more quickly and accurately. Digital integration can enable their sales teams to develop opportunities in their CRM, and have the information instantly push the request for audit, along with account and contact details, to their retrofit project platform.

The systems will then stay in sync, appraising team members of project development status and critical customer proposal deliverables. When projects are mobilized, in-progress and finalized, integration can ensure complete team visibility and update project financials within the accounting or ERP platform. 

The Benefits of an Integrated Approach

By embracing integration, energy services companies can:

1. Increase Efficiency: Eliminate double data entry and automate information flow between systems and accomplish more work with less time and labor.
2. Improve Accuracy: Reduce human error and ensure data consistency across platforms.
3. Boost Team Collaboration: Involve all stakeholders in important workflows providing real-time updates, task assignments, and progress tracking—all without having to leave the system.
4. Enhance Decision-Making: Get a wholistic view of your business with data from multiple sources.
5. Boost Scalability: Easily add or change components as your business grows and evolves.
6. Focus on Core Competencies: Spend less time managing software and more time on energy-saving projects.
7. Achieve Better Financial Controls: Keep your financial house in order by integrating with accounting and financial platforms such as QuickBooks, NetSuite, or a host of others. Automated invoicing, expense tracking, and project-based accounting are just a few ways integration ensures accurate financial reporting, which can help avoid costly errors.
8. Future-Proof the Organization: Integration opens the door for future scalability. Avoid system dead ends and evolve your platforms to keep your operation flexible and adaptable to new technologies and business needs.

From "Build vs. Buy" to "Buy and Integrate"

With few options to “build” (due to the extensive time, expense and complexity) or “buy” technology purposefully designed for every unique workflow of your organization, a “buy and integrate” approach may be ideal. When considering an integrated approach, start by taking inventory on your primary customer, operational, and financial workflows and systems, and then prioritize them as the keys to your company’s ability to execute.

As an energy-efficiency retrofit service provider, your CRM (like SalesForce.com, HubSpot or others) may be the initial intake platform to identify, nurture and close project sales opportunities. Your primary project system (like SnapCount) would serve as the central hub for all project development, estimation, mobilization, deployment, commissioning and as-built activities and data. Finally, your accounting and/or ERP system (e.g. QuickBooks, NetSuite, etc.) would be the repository of company financial and reporting data. Other systems or apps used for communication or visibility (e.g. Slack or Teams) may also be considered for integration but may play a secondary role.

Once you have identified your primary business applications, your integration needs become more focused. While it’s easy to get caught in a “build vs. buy” dilemma when addressing workflow and data access deficiencies, companies embracing the "buy and integrate" approach find this strategy allows them to:

• Leverage best-in-class solutions for specific functions
• Avoid reinventing the wheel
• Benefit from ongoing updates and improvements from specialized providers
• Create a flexible, modular system that can evolve with their needs

Integration Approaches

Modern software technologies are increasingly designed to accommodate integration with other applications and platforms. Below are some general approaches to connecting your applications.

API Approach:

API’s (Application Programming Interfaces) allow different software applications to communicate with each other using standardized methods. These interfaces expose functionality and data through well-defined endpoints (start and termination points of the programs) using standard protocols (procedures and syntax).

This may require your internal IT department or a 3^rd party consultant to complete.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

An ESB acts as a central middleware platform that manages communication between various applications and services within an organization. It acts as a message broker between different systems providing translation, routing, enrichment and central management of integrations and business rules.

Due to the development complexity, this solutions is mostly utilized by large enterprise companies.

Cloud-Based Integration Platforms (iPaaS)

These platforms, often referred to as Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), provide cloud-hosted tools and services for connecting various applications and data sources.

Cloud-based integration platforms offer pre-built connectors for common business applications and data sources and provide visual tools for designing integration flows and data mappings.

Examples of this approach include Zapier, Mulesoft or Workato.

What you put into practice is bound to be more of a hybrid approach, and more importantly, something straightforward that can be maintained without a lot of additional overhead. If your primary project development platform offers comprehensive integration and or iPaaS capability, consider partnering with your construction software vendor (like SnapCount) to manage your workflow integration.

SnapCount has been working with high-growth energy services and retrofit contracting companies to optimize their enterprise workflow and perform at scale for a growing market. SnapCount’s integration platform “SnapConnect” offers an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) functions that can help customers connect all their critical applications to optimize their energy projects business. Our dedicated integrations team can serve as your integrations experts to guide, implement and provide “one hand to shake” for all your integrations needs.

To learn more about how SnapCount can help you achieve operational excellence through integration, book a call here.