We would like to seek your feedback on a proposed Open Source Software Solution (ERP) to manage utility scale projects at the company. It passed our pre-evaluation criteria in terms of innovativeness, competitiveness vs. existing solution, etc.
However our second and most important evaluation criteria is whether it meets the needs of the sector. We would like to know if you will adopt this kind of solution to manage your business operations, should this solution get funded and available as open source.
Share your feedback directly in the forum here for everyone to see and participate.
These are the questions we are trying to answer:
Would the list of deliverables be sufficient for you to adopt this innovation?
How disappointed would you be if we did NOT go ahead in developing and open sourcing this innovation?
e.g. Very disappointed, Somewhat disappointed, Not disappointed
Can you share potential scenarios when this innovation would NOT work for you?
Anything else we should know?
Open Source Innovation Description
Goal: Open Source software solution for utility scale projects /companies which will allow them to monitor all the aspects of the project/s through a single platform such as project performance, Actual Vs. budgeted project spends, inflows and outflows of cash , HR Requirements, Equipment Requirements, Tracking Time Allocation, Task Allocation and Automation, and Chain of Command. This will enhance business reporting, which will translate to making informed decisions based on project/company’s data.
The software solution will cover the following list of features and functionalities, not currently offered by existing solutions such as Odyssey:
Project Attractiveness Scoring, Pipeline Management and Deal tracking
Automation and Enriching of Development Process with notifications
Pipeline, PM, CRM & ERP Integration
Project Resource Loading
Industry benchmarking
Carbon Credits
Proposed Deliverables
Coding of web based solution, based on open source
Web Based solution with number of online overviews
API’s to number of available applications that will be integrated with this web based ecosystem solution such as Airtable , Hubspot, Asana Etc.
Hello all. Thanks to Aarti for inviting us to comment on this. Enian offers a portfolio management platform that enables tasks, files, schedules and financials to be overseen by teams in a single secure environment.
The platform is fully configurable- so while you can quickly create a utility-scale solar PV project and start collaborating using our solar template, you also have the option to configure all of the reproting metrics to fit whatever process you are running.
Since the platform is designed for use in any market, we do not impose project scoring methods on the user. However, there is an open source tool called REIA, which could be used on the platform to add social and environmental impact criteria to project evaluation:
Our platform will take your projects from initial concept to construction. We would recommend a different solution for live monitoring/ asset management once a project is generating electricity. Most manufacturers provide this software and/or there are plenty of great solutions out there for monitoring day-to-day performance of solar assets.
Please let us know what additional questions we can answer. If there is an opportunity for EnAccess Foundation to use our software, we may in turn be able to increase the number of free admins on a Basic account to help do our part to accelerate energy access in the markets you are serving.
Hi Phillips,
Thanks for sharing more details about your RE software solution. EnAccess foundation is not using ERP solution but rather have received request for funding of creating this open source ERP solution. After the proposal clears our internal evaluation, we share it with relevant energy access practitioners to seek their feedback. If companies will be interested to use it for their business, once the solution is published for public use. We call this process as stakeholder consultation process. We are leveraging OSEA community for seeking the feedback as well in an open and transparent way.
Aarti
Hi Aarti and all. Thanks for your feedback on this. Both myself and Varun Sharma (Co-founder/ COO) began our careers in the energy access sector. I co-founded Scene and Varun was the first employee at BBOXX. We understand from firsthand experience how challenging and critical service delivery is for this market and as a result, we are committed to offering our software 100% free to energy access practitioners.
As of now if you are working in the energy access sector you can sign up and start using our Basic software now for free - for up to 3 admins. If additional admins are required, please just message me with a link to your LinkedIn profile and a short description of the use case and we will furnish you with a 100% free discount code for Pro (assuming your use case is genuine).
Wishing you all a fruitful summer making the world a better place for those most at risk of climate chaos.
In order to judge how useful this solution would be for other companies, one essential piece of information is missing: Under which license will the project be published?
And is the company behind it going to continue supporting the software and build a community behind it? Or does it already have a community?
In general, I’m wondering how an ERP software for energy access sector differs from a generic ERP software and if a dedicated solution is really necessary. I guess there are some generic open source ERP solutions already?
ERP software is required to operate the company, but it’s normally not a company’s core product. In order to adopt this solution, one has to be very sure that it works reliably and that your own devs don’t need to spend their time on fixing the ERP solution instead of developing your actual products. Also if such a potentially heavy piece of software is not backed by a large open source community, the risk of the project being abandoned in the future can be quite high.
I agree with your feedback Martin. The solution will available under MIT license. The innovator do not intend to create a new software from the scratch but instead create a platform which will serve as an integrator to all the different applications like Asana, Hubspot and the likes and be able to pull data from these applications to visualize and manage a companies portfolio, important contacts and pipeline.
*This adds a layer above average project management to capture the business aspects of a project. When a manager logs they can answer questions like:
What projects are existent with Africa or the different power pools? Can I view all the information on those projects?
What is the viability of each project in Africa if I take it through a screening process?
What projects can we add to our portfolio/hope to acquire?
What stage in the acquisition process are we?
After acquiring a project:
What stage is our project at?
What are the important documents?
How much has been spent and what do the financials look like?
What needs to be done and what is holding the project back?
What resources have been spent and are available to the company as a whole currently?
*Can we understand, through machine learning, the likelihood of a project failing or succeeding based on predictor variables that we set and can update periodically?
The innovator intend to achieve this through app integrations, an energy database, pipeline management and an enterprise resource management system.This is the foundation onto which this will be built on top of. Team believes that having integration platform into the middle of the already existent ecosystem of applications would be a better strategy than reinventing the wheel. That way, it can feed off the power of these systems and do more interesting things ."
Let me know what do you think ?
One more thought on ERP and open source in general: ERPNext seems to be a great tool, which supports many use cases and integrations already out of the box.
