In a virtual Solar Town Hall Meeting hosted by BayWa r.e. a panel of guests, including Blu Banyan’s CEO Jan Rippingale, discussed the challenges faced by solar companies that have come to rely on piecemealed functionality of generic software applications used together, also known as “Software Stacking”, and provided a single software solution for accounting, project management, sales, and operations.
During the Town Hall, Rippingale explains, “The hairball [of software] is where most solar companies are starting. Typically accounting [data] is siloed, which means you end up hiding the information or requiring someone to be the gateway person. It creates a bottleneck around accounting and situations where you have multiple data sources, and various different interfaces that you need to learn.”
Blu Banyan’s SolarSuccess software provides solutions for solar install companies by eliminating the myriad of messy workarounds inherent in the ‘hairball’ of software stacking. “What we think is going to help the industry grow, by reducing the ‘soft costs’ -all the things to actually get solar deployed quickly, is going to be more of a single data source. SolarSuccess is a layer on top of NetSuite because they enabled us to have the accounting database, so you’re literally referencing the exact same tables that you have in your accounting system,” said Rippingale. She went on to explain the importance of all departments having access to a ‘single truth’ of real time data.
Panelist J.W. Peters, Principal of Solar Power of Oklahoma, and a current user of SolarSuccess says, “I was not looking for the accounting solution that had CRM and operations integrated into it. I kind of found Blu Banyan almost by accident, because I figured it was going to be an operations software that had CRM come in on one side and accounting come in on the other side, but until I met with SolarSuccess and the folks at Blu Banyan I didn’t realize that it really needed to be the accounting solution that tied the others into it. That was kind of a mind-shift for me.”
Joe Marhamati, the CFO/VP/Co-Founder of Ipsun Solar, who has also implemented SolarSuccess, shares his experience of how his team gets company buy-in by democratically selecting software, rather than using top-down decision making.
In a mock consulting session Rippingale gave her pitch to panelists and addressed their specific concerns including:
- Scalability and Projected Growth
- Digital Transformation and Continual Improvement
- Consistent Customer Experience
- Emerging Standards in Software Solutions
If you would like more information, this Solar Town Hall Meeting is available to Watch this Solar Town Hall on Demand
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