DiLytics Helps BayREN Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions with A Centralized Data Aggregation and Reporting Solution

The Bay Area Regional Energy Network (BayREN), founded in 2013, is a collaborative effort of the nine counties that make up the San Francisco Bay Area. It operates in the Environmental Services industry and is overseen by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). BayREN’s mission is to implement successful regional energy-saving programs, leveraging the knowledge and experience of local governments in the Bay Area. BayREN achieves this by developing and administering programs that promote climate protection, resource conservation, and sustainability. 

 

 

Business Context 

The Water Upgrades Save Program was launched in the year 2020 and aims to reduce water and energy usage to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by customers. The Program achieves this aim by installing efficient upgrades like toilets, showerheads, and aerators at customers’ homes.

 

The Program operates through utility companies. It funds utility companies to install water and energy efficiency upgrades at customers’ homes with little to no upfront cost to the customer. The Program targets single-family and multi-family homes and small businesses. Once the upgrades are completed, customers benefit from lower water and energy bills.

 

In addition to these upgrades, the Program includes an outreach initiative designed to achieve a wider impact by increasing awareness among customers. This initiative is conducted through letters and other communication channels, ensuring that people learn about the Program and its benefits.

 

Though BayREN employed a comprehensive approach and undertook a variety of activities toward achievement of the Program’s objectives, it suffered from several business and technical issues indicated below:

Solution to BayREN

 

To address these challenges, BayREN identified the need to implement a data analytics solution that will source data from multiple sources, store it in a persistent form in a centralized location, enable its analysis from different stakeholders’ perspectives and present it to users in a visually appealing manner.  

Through a competitive bidding process, BayREN chose DiLytics as its partner to implement such a solution. 

DiLytics’ Solution 

DiLytics went about the task of implementing the solution in a phased manner which comprised the following phases: 

 

1. Discovery Phase 

 

DiLytics started the Discovery phase by identifying the various stakeholder groups involved in the Program and gaining an understanding of the role that they play in carrying out Program activities at the ground level. Based on this understanding, DiLytics created structured questionnaires for each stakeholder group and shared it with them well in advance of the scheduled discovery workshop date. Utilizing the structured questionnaire as the basis of the discovery workshop discussion, DiLytics elicited the required information pertaining to the various aspects of the Program from the stakeholders.  

 

The different stakeholder groups that DiLytics held the workshops with, included: 

  • Program Lead: responsible for overseeing and coordinating the Program across the counties
  • Program Implementer: who maintains and manages all the data, and customer application forms of the Program
  • Key Business Users: business users from the various counties
  • IT Team: that maintains the IT infrastructure


DiLytics also conducted a thorough review and analysis of the Program’s existing IT architecture, processes, data flow, and technical design. Leveraging its extensive experience in Data Warehousing, Data Integration, and Analytics, DiLytics evaluated BayREN’s current platform, identified issues, gaps, unrealized opportunities, and technology deficiencies.  

 

DiLytics utilized the insights gathered from the workshops to: 

  • Understand the current state of the Program
  • Draw the future state desired by various Stakeholder groups
  • Identify strategies to take the Program from its current state to the future state
  • Create a roadmap for implementing the identified strategies

 

The output of the discovery phase was a comprehensive report that captured the findings related to the current state of the Program and the future state desired by stakeholders; analysis of those findings; recommendations about the proposed solution, its architecture, tools for various architecture components; and the roadmap to implement the solution. 

 

2. Implementation Phase 

 

DiLytics went about implementing the solution by leveraging its established methodology that comprised of the following phases: 

  • Solution Design
  • Solution Development
  • Key User Training
  • User Acceptance Testing
  • Solution Deployment

The solution entailed an automated data integration process that extracted data from Smartsheet application; consolidated the data into a cloud-based data warehouse on Snowflake; and disseminated insights to users via a data visualization tool, Tableau. A high-level architecture of the solution is depicted in the schematic below:

BayREN Solution Architecture

The solution enabled a series of interactive reports that offer a visual representation of key metrics across various aspects of the Program, allowing for easy interpretation and analysis.  

 

Some of the key reports that the solution provided include: 

  • Reconciliation Report: Provides partner utilities, the Program, and ABAG a monthly report on new and prior project data, including on-bill charges, project cost, utility fee, capital fee, and admin fee, as well as repayment schedule.
  • Payment Summary: Provides partner utilities with an internal invoice to facilitate the process of ABAG repayment each month.
  • Finance Report: Provides partner utilities with a list of projects and all associated financial details.
  • Utility Dashboard: Provides partner utilities with a printable dashboard for reporting to governing bodies and community partners.
  • Customer Documents: This document possesses all customer documents, including the project summary, installation approval checklist, participation agreement, and notice of efficiency charge. Capital Tracking Chart: It outlines the details of utility payments and their respective timelines, any funding requests made by the Program, the distribution of the three fees, and how the Program operator spends the capital.

 

Some of the KPIs that the solution enabled included:

  • Enrollments: Tracks the number of individuals who have signed up and are scheduled to participate in the Program.
  • Assessments Completed: Measures the success rate of participants in completing their assessments.
  • Completed Projects: Reflects the number of projects that have been successfully finalized and delivered.
  • Estimated Annual Gallons Saved: Refers to the total volume of water saved annually through implemented initiatives.
  • Estimated Annual Therms Saved: Estimates the total amount of thermal energy saved annually.
  • Number of Shower Heads Installed: Measures the number of showers installed.
  • Number of Toilets Installed: Measures the number of toilets installed.
  • Total On Bill Charges: Focuses on the cumulative charges incurred by customers.

Outcomes 

The solution resulted in the achievement of the following outcomes for BayREN: 

  • Enhanced Program Design and Delivery: Enablement of storage of historical data insights equipped BayREN to track Program trends, measure progress over time, and identify areas for improvement. This enabled enhancing the performance and efficiency of the Program.
  • Improved RoI on Outreach Efforts: Enablement of capture of outreach efforts allowed BayREN to measure the effectiveness of its outreach efforts. This allowed BayREN to optimize its outreach strategy, allocate resources more effectively, and improve the return on investment of the Program.
  • Effective Decision Making: The availability of drill-down functionality allowed BayREN users to delve deeper into specific data points within reports. This provided a more granular understanding of trends and anomalies, enabling data-driven decisions based on a clearer picture of the underlying factors.
  • Higher Operational Efficiency: Automation of data extraction, data transformation, report generation, and report dissemination processes led to significant improvement in the operational efficiency of the Program via efficient utilization of resources.
  • Superior User Experience: Automation of the data integration process and creation of a centralized data repository enabled easy data access, efficient data analysis, and improved data quality. This led to the efficient generation of reports by users and the delivery of reliable insights to stakeholders.

About DiLytics 

DiLytics is a leading IT service provider, specializing in the domain of data analytics – Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Data Integration, Data Visualization and Predictive Analytics. The company has a presence in the US, Canada, and India and has undertaken multiyear, multimillion-dollar projects for several clients which is a testament to its capabilities and expertise in the data analytics domain.   

 

With 12+ years of existence, DiLytics has been a trusted partner for clients across 20+ industries and has established a strong record of collaborating with global clients in the public as well as commercial sectors. DiLytics brings a wealth of experience in the data analytics space: 10,000+ happy users, 100+ person-years of project experience, 100+ successful projects, and 30+ clients. With a comprehensive suite of 35+ service and solution offerings, it has empowered clients in their journey to make data-driven decisions.    

 

What sets DiLytics apart is its innovative Insight Solutions. DiLytics has a multitude of readymade, end-to-end, plug-and-play data analytics solutions developed under the name DiLytics Insight Solutions. These solutions are available in various areas, including Financial, HR, Procurement, Property Management Analytics, Compliance analytics, Grant, and PBCS insight. These solutions are designed to be implemented fast, often going live within a few weeks!  

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