A UK-based energy supplier needed engineering expertise to deliver various projects across the organisation while changing business direction throughout 2021. Our main goal was to create a platform that could be white-labelled and provide an excellent user experience to manage household energy consumption, conduct transactions, and split bills among household users.

The Challenge

Initially, we helped our client with their smart meter project by focusing on ongoing improvement throughout their business. We helped them streamline and optimise their engineering processes to ensure timely and cost-effective rollouts of new features. We used short feedback loops to make iterative improvements and increase the project's impact.

Our Approach

Infrastructure Makeover

We assisted the client in transitioning from their old to the new architecture to enhance the billing system.

We improved an outdated finance application known as "Judith", which had a monolithic design that lacked advanced features. Our teams worked tirelessly to update the finance application with the latest technologies, ensuring that the white-label platform delivered a top-notch customer experience.

Together, we decided to split the application into smaller services and deploy them on a Cloud Native and Kubernetes setup for improved reliability and flexibility.

In addition to our efforts to enhance the system's storage backup process and automate archive file movement into the Cloud, we leveraged Google Cloud Native tools. To further optimise our infrastructure, we incorporated various DevOps tools that facilitated automation and mitigated the risk of introducing errors.

Here are more various tools that optimised our way of working and efficiency:

• Managed underlying infrastructure as code using Terraform.
• Created and improved Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines for smooth code deployment to various environments (Stage, Production). Tools used: ArgoCD, CircleCI.
• Improved the visibility and monitoring of the application behaviour and troubleshooting possible issues via the Datadog tool. As a result of our work, the visibility of application behaviour and logging on the software components was also improved.

Payments and Finance

One of the client’s goals was for end-users to be in full control of their household energy bill and consumption. When we partnered with them, we helped them get a step closer to achieving this by building the foundational features of payments and finance in the white-label platform.

We developed a feature that dupes as a wallet, refining how end-users manage different transactions through a ledger. As a result, users can make the most out of the platform with how they pay their bills, distribute money across multiple properties, and move that money between properties as they see fit. It would also enable the user to share the bill gracefully and flexibly with other people who may live in the same household.

To make things better for our client’s customers, we added a new layer to our legacy systems. This layer gives us a consistent way to integrate different models, which means we can improve the platform and give our customers an even better experience.