ESFORIN Smart flexibility marketing with optimised usability

The energy transformation is creating tremendous challenges for the electricity market: while the share of renewable energies is continuously increasing, power grids must remain stable and reliable. ESFORIN, a European market leader in what is known as flexibility marketing, plays a key role in the integration of renewables. ESFORIN balances energy production and consumption, integrates renewable energies into the power grid, and thus contributes to network stability.

For over 10 years, ESFORIN has been working successfully with its customers and more than 20 different asset types – from battery storage systems to industry operations. The company now wants to optimise its customer portal to elevate the user experience while making energy marketing even easier. The company has leveraged inovex’s front-end know-how to create an even more user-friendly portal, one tailored specifically to ESFORIN’s high customer requirements and equipped with the latest functions to enable efficient and transparent marketing. 

The challenge

ESFORIN’s vision is to use a state-of-the-art customer portal to combine its own energy marketing expertise seamlessly with the specific requirements of its customers. The collaboration project aimed to create a tool which provides both short-term notice of available capacities and deep insights into asset performance – all while remaining easy to use, transparent, and reliable.

The project

To achieve this goal, the project began with joint workshops designed to determine the precise requirements of the new portal. Equipped with this information, the project team were able to use story mapping sessions to prioritise the relevant use cases for a minimum viable product (MVP) and to define the basis for an agile backlog.

Within this process, inovex assumed multiple roles: experienced product owners and scrum masters supported the requirements elicitation process and gradually introduced ESFORIN to agile methods. The team was enhanced by UI/UX designers and by front-end and back-end developers. ESFORIN contributed both a team of developers with far-reaching expertise and its specialist knowledge of the energy industry in order to align the customer platform as precisely as possible with the needs of its customers.

The focus of the project was the redesign of the portal: a fresh, responsive look and feel and intuitive operation made it considerably easier for users to find their way around. On the back end, several of the company’s older systems were removed and replaced with modern, scalable architecture. At the same time, inovex used best practices to build up a cloud infrastructure to support ESFORIN in successfully migrating the portal to the cloud. Targeted training courses and knowledge transfer are empowering ESFORIN employees to operate the platform independently and to continue to develop it further on their own.

The close integration of market knowledge and technical expertise has been a particular characteristic of the project. The project teams worked together to further develop features like the fifteen-minute asset availability notification function and the automated transfer of information to trading systems and to implement them agilely. At the same time, a dashboard featuring responsive charts was developed to enable relevant information to be easily and intuitively queried.

Results and future plans

The result is the user-friendly expansion of the ESFORIN customer portal. Customers can continue to easily announce their flexibility and receive fully transparent information on their assets, while new features added during the project enable them to track revenues and asset-specific key figures. For battery energy storage systems, for example, these include the number of charge-discharge cycles. In addition, customers are now enjoying the benefits of a highly integrated asset management solution in an even more stable and secure cloud environment.

The introduction of dashboards with relevant KPIs enable customers to maintain an overview of their assets at all times and to market their flexibility more easily. At the same time, the new portal architecture makes further development easier for ESFORIN: processes have become more agile, the team is empowered to continue working independently on the product, and the technical foundation for growth has been laid.

ESFORIN plans to continue to expand the portal by integrating additional external systems and adding more analysis functions. The company is thus optimally equipped to support both existing industry customers and new customer groups sustainably during the energy transition and to contribute decisively to shaping the flexibility market.