ASOLAR

Helping a renewable energy company bring electricity, joy and new opportunities to the most rural parts of Africa.

Who Are ASOLAR and What Was the Project About?

Based in Nigeria, ASOLAR uses renewable energy solutions to provide electricity to rural areas in Africa where conventional grid is out of reach. Their service directly improves people's lives and provides new opportunities to communities across the region. With unconventional solutions come unconventional challenges. To date, ASOLAR has deployed over 24,000 renewable energy systems.


The Opportunity

ASOLAR uses several different systems to monitor their solar panels, process mobile payments, maintain customer information and manage their service agents. Using these systems helped ASOLAR get off the ground quickly but as they grew, they noticed they were losing visibility of their business operations.

It became clear that having data about different aspects of their business in separate systems was no longer viable and a central, unified solution was required to bring back visibility over their operations.


The Solution

It was clear from the beginning that it was critical to keep the ongoing cost of the end product to a minimum. As such, we set out with a goal to find a cost effective solution but one which could make a real difference to ASOLAR's business.


Having assessed multiple cloud platforms, we determined that Microsoft Azure would give us the tools required while helping keep ongoing infrastructure costs down to a minimum. We implemented a solution which brings all the data from disparate systems into one place and connects it all together: customer accounts are joined up with their payment information, solar panel information is joined up with service agent records and many other data points are unified to break down data silos. Data is then stored in a format which makes it easy to analyse.


The analysis and reporting are handled by Microsoft Power BI, one of the leading data analytics solutions.


The Outcome

With up-to-date, centralised and unified data processed automatically, ASOLAR has full visibility of their business operations again. For example, the company can see where issues are cropping up on the map according to their severity and prioritise the assignment of service agents to deal with them accordingly. That helps ASOLAR distribute their resources more effectively.


The project was completed on time and with some clever ideas for the infrastructure, ongoing costs have been kept to a minimum.

Late payments reduced by
50%

The solution that Blitz Effect put in place made a huge difference. We managed to cut the number of late payments by 50% in just two months. That considerably improved our cashflow.

Laurynas Vaičiulis CEO @ ASOLAR