Streamlining Commercial Solar Field Operations and Fueling Business Expansion with SiteCapture: The O&M Success Story

At a Glance

Amicus O&M Cooperative and Omnidian used SiteCapture to enhance solar field operations, achieving efficiency and scalability, exemplifying technology’s impact on the industry’s growth and quality standards. 

Challenge

Omnidian was focused on efficient scaling, with a vision to expand its business across the United States. They recognized the need for a revamp and an improvement to the current workflows and processes built on SiteCapture in order to scale more efficiently and delight their clients.

Solution 

Amicus O&M Cooperative collaborated closely with SiteCapture, Omnidian, and other cooperative members to rebuild and test their preventive maintenance forms with new robust features to meet the O&M industry’s unique requirements. 

Omnidian took the solution a step further, iterating on their unique version of the SiteCapture form to build out an efficient check-in and check-out flow within the form along with customized PDF reporting for their clients across the nation. 

Benefits

• Efficiency: A more user-friendly and comprehensive Preventative Maintenance survey led to more surveys completed correctly the first time, saving time and truck rolls. 
• Scalability: The updated survey and PDF reports allowed the teams to scale operations quickly while maintaining quality. 
• Client & Partner Delight: Omnidian’s partners and customers were happy with the more professional and repeatable processes and PDF reports. 

Key Metrics

Since embracing SiteCapture’s capabilities and developing new preventative maintenance forms, Omnidian has been able to equip its members with another great tool to drive the commercial O&M space forward. Using SiteCapture, Omnidian has experienced significant business growth and operational improvements: 

• 75+ Partners Onboarded
• 1,900+ Projects Completed in 2023
• 400 + Hours Saved per Month

The Full Story

In today’s competitive solar landscape, harnessing cutting-edge technology to optimize operations and drive growth is essential. This case study delves into how Amicus O&M Cooperative and Omnidian, two leaders in renewable energy operations and maintenance, harnessed the power of SiteCapture to revolutionize their field service operations. By revamping their existing preventative maintenance surveys and developing organized and well-designed PDF reports, Amicus & Omnidian successfully improved efficiency, quality, and scalability, resulting in remarkable business efficiency and growth.

Meet the Teams

Amicus O&M Cooperative is a collective of solar operations and maintenance (O&M) providers throughout North America. The cooperative provides a suite of tools, processes, and software, fostering knowledge exchange, and offering a dedicated training program for O&M experts, empowering its member companies to deliver safe, streamlined, and standardized services. Under the leadership of Amanda Bybee, the cooperative does not directly engage in O&M work, but instead, it acts as a vital support system for its member companies, who in turn directly serve their clients. 

Omnidian is one such cooperative member, on a mission to protect and accelerate investments in clean energy through performance assurance. On the commercial side of their business (where this case study focuses) they partner with solar developers, installers, asset owners, and operators to reduce operational costs and increase asset uptime. They do this through the use of proprietary monitoring and boots-on-the-ground preventative and corrective maintenance, working with partners (solar technicians) that complete preventative maintenance surveys and remedy system issues. 

The Challenge

Omnidian was focused on efficient scaling, with a vision to expand its business across the United States. They recognized the need for a revamp and an improvement to the current workflows and processes built on SiteCapture in order to scale more efficiently and delight their clients. Their objectives included: 

• Enhance preventive maintenance forms and client-facing reports
• Improve data accuracy and flow between field and office teams
• Scale operations while maintaining quality standards
• Drive business growth

However, they recognized the work to redesign the Preventative Maintenance survey with a resulting custom PDF report and be able to test it in the field would be very time-intensive. 

The Solution

Jessica Gibbon, Director of Commercial Portfolio Operations at Omnidian, brought this challenge to Amanda Bybee, CEO of Amicus O&M Cooperative, who also was a SiteCapture user and understood the value to cooperative members to have a survey structure that would scale with their industry. 

Amanda collaborated closely with SiteCapture and other Amicus Cooperative members to rebuild the preventive maintenance template. This new template incorporated SiteCapture’s robust features to meet the O&M industry’s unique requirements, including: 

• Site Data Auto-population: Automating the integration of site-specific data into preventive maintenance forms, reducing manual data entry, and minimizing errors.
• Advanced In-App Workflows: Utilizing if/then logic to create comprehensive in-app workflows, empowering field service vendors (FSRs) to make real-time decisions based on inspection outcomes.
• Automated Work Order Generation: Automatically generating work orders based on inspection findings, ensuring swift and accurate follow-up actions. 

In addition to these core features of the preventative maintenance report that Amicus rolled out to their cooperative members, Omnidian worked collaboratively with SiteCapture to develop new innovative functionalities: 

• Efficient Check-in and Check-out Flow: Implementing a streamlined site visit check-in and check-out process, improving transparency and accountability with geolocation, time, and date stamps.
• Custom Reports for Clients: Building custom-built summarized and detailed PDF reports for Omnidian’s clients, enhancing the value of the service provided. 

The Implementation

Omnidian’s transformational journey began with iterative testing among a group of super users to fine-tune their version of the preventive maintenance template. As the solution evolved, Omnidian seamlessly rolled out the template to their partners – the field survey technicians and teams tasked with remedying systems with issues. The successful implementation paved the way for future expansion, enabling Omnidian to onboard new partners with ease and please clients with well-structured reports that were consistent regardless of the field tech partners that the case was assigned.