Strategy and Solutions

Zymr partnered with Alliander to deliver the first version of the client’s Smart Grid Energy Share SaaS platform. We worked diligently to integrate the live Smart Grid management system with the first few collective and member registrations. The second phase of this project was also assigned to us, which included analytics using big data infrastructure, such as Amazon Elastic MapReduce.We developed a UX-driven HTML, JavaScript, jQuery, and JS UI for dashboards and role-based access control for Tenant Admin, Member, and System Admin. We implemented the core services using a clustered MySQL database and integrated Joomla based web portal and CMS to enable the integration of additional content to encourage social sharing among members and the client. Our team generated comprehensive reports in PDF format for each of the participating members and collectives. The subscriber service registered new energy collectives and members in the platform tier. Solar Grid protocol connector gathered data from smart meters using proprietary REST APIs. We offered SMS based notification service that pushed alerts on specific events during power generation and consumption by each of the members in the energy collective.Our team extracted ETL tenant-specific and member-specific data from the client’s Smart Solar Grid management system and parsed the data into specific real-time and historical records. We generated carbon credits as a means to encourage alternative carbon-free energy generation. We used Agile development processes, i.e., Jira. Continuous Integration developed using Jenkins and SVN for software repository. We also developed a comprehensive test plan using Rally and executed most tests manually with some automated scripts in Python.

Business Challenges

Alliander was facing tracking issues. They wanted a real-time portal to track energy share credits generated by the solar energy cooperatives that power Liander’s SmartGrid. They intended to create a rich UX-driven SaaS web portal to present energy use and generation data in real-time to its solar energy cooperatives and their members.,

Business Impacts / Key Results Achieved

Alliander wanted to build a comprehensive real-time portal to easily track the energy share credits generated by the solar energy cooperatives that power Liander’s SmartGrid. As data related to energy share played a crucial role in their business, they needed a rich UX driven SaaS web portal to present energy use and generation data in real-time to its solar energy cooperatives and their members. Alliander had specific requirements in the SaaS platform viz. ability to register a new energy collective (i.e., tenant), data ETL and analysis of tenant and sub-tenant data, member Energy Share dashboard and reports, and a marketplace for trading energy credits.