Energy consultancy satisfies customers with an updated energy consumption dashboard

The challenge

Need to convert classic ASP to .NET

At the time of this project, a large part of the consultancy’s business relied on an energy consumption dashboard application. The consultancy’s customers used this application to report on and manage their corporate energy consumption.

However, the application had been built many years before in Classic ASP, an outdated Microsoft programming language. The consultancy had identified this legacy code as a problem going forward — causing higher development costs and reduced software flexibility.

So the first priority was to convert Classic ASP to .NET in the reporting application. Once that was achieved, the consultancy wanted to sharpen its competitive edge in the market by adding improved reporting functionality.

A further concern was the upcoming licence renewal for the Oracle database software used by the reporting application. The consultancy was keen to reduce its licensing costs by finding an alternative database.

The solution

Refreshing energy management software

Based on our track record of .NET development, the consultancy chose Influential to modernise its energy consumption dashboard.

The central nature of this application to the client’s business caused us to take a phased approach to development. In this way we could minimise risk and ensure the perfect functionality without disrupting the business.

We broke this energy management software development project into six core stages.

1. Discovery

At this stage we performed a full review of the application and related technologies. The outcome was a document detailing the approach, plan, and cost of development. This included an accurate calculation of work hours, pricing, and the predicted end date.

2. Rebuild in .NET

The first stage of development was a like-for-like rebuild of the application. This required us to re-engineer the entire application, as there is no automated way to convert Classic ASP to .NET.

3. Redesign for mobile and user personalisation

One of the consultancy’s goals was to bring its industrial energy management software to mobile devices. We developed a mobile-responsive version of the energy consumption dashboard software to enable this functionality. A secondary goal was to allow users to configure their own dashboards, which we achieved with .NET development.

4. Development of dynamic reporting capability

A further improvement was added functionality to let users create, store, revisit, edit, and re-run their own reports. We achieved this by developing new front-end screens and back-end data processing in .NET.

5. Database migration from Oracle to SQL Server

With a licence renewal for Oracle database looming, the management decided it was time to cut hosting costs. We achieved this by migrating the application’s data from Oracle to SQL Server.

6. Ongoing development support

In the months following the rebuild, our team provided a swathe of extra design and functionality changes when requested. These included changes such as restyling the company website to match the new application interface.

The benefits

Competitive energy management software