A look back on three years of cooperation: Daniel Bauer, Product Manager Energy Consulting at Elektrizitätswerke des Kantons Zürich (EKZ), reports how the use of Reportheld has changed everyday life in energy consulting.

groupXS : Mr. Bauer, it’s been three years since we sat down in Nuremberg and talked about your ideas and requirements. How has your day-to-day work changed since then?

Bauer : It has become more efficient. We save a lot of time, especially in post-processing an order. And our project is constantly expanding. How do you say? Appetite comes with food. And it was the same with us with Reportheld. After we had implemented the first protocol for the energy consultancy, with every new product our colleagues asked “Couldn’t that also be implemented in Reportheld?” And our project grows with these ideas.

groupXS : You just mentioned the first protocol and with it the beginning of our cooperation. Let’s go back to the beginning. What was the reason that you started looking for a software solution in the first place?

Bauer : EKZ has the legal mandate to promote energy efficiency in the canton of Zurich. EKZ-Energieberatung supports customers in the areas of solar energy, heating, energy saving and electromobility. In August 2017, the “free self-consumption check” * campaign was launched. During the on-site consultation, the self-consumption potential of the self-produced electricity was analyzed. The action triggered over 1000 consultations in six months. With pen and paper, we couldn’t have done it in a useful time. So a digital solution was needed.

groupXS : That was of course a big challenge for your department and also for us. The project should start within a very short time and we started from scratch to digitize the consulting process in Reportheld – including complex calculations, automatically generated graphics and interactive tables in the expert opinion for the customer.

Bauer : Yes, we were really pressed for time. We sat down with you at the end of May 2017. Our project then started in June. We did our first consultations in September, but we were still in the final spurt with the configuration of Reportheld. That meant ticking off checklists on the clipboard with a ballpoint pen, then taking the checklists home, entering them on the computer and printing them out again. At the beginning of October, our consultants were finally on the road with Reportheld. We rose from the analogue Stone Age to the digital Champions League.

groupXS : And how did your energy consultants cope with this change?

Bauer : At the beginning we carried out training courses with our employees and maintained a regular exchange of experiences, after which it was “learning by doing”. That went extremely well because the application is really very intuitive and easy to use, even for some of our consultants who are not that digital.

groupXS : Now that you have been using the application for three years, what is your conclusion?

Bauer: Well, every day we have energy consultants with a report, none of whom would want to give up the report. Back then, post-processing took at least an hour. You had to pull all the photos from the cell phone, insert them into the report and enter everything again. Now we can close the report right away. Report hero works 1: 1 like in your explanatory video, that was like a present for us.

groupXS : Great, that’s how it should be. Thank you very much for the feedback and of course for the great cooperation over the past few years.

The interview was conducted by Caroline Bußmann and Sebastian Schmidt