Donovan Energy and SnapCount - EV Charging Station Software Case Study

With demand for electric vehicles (EVs) and charging stations growing by leaps and bounds, many businesses view electrification not just as a good idea but as an inevitability. Aiming to bring their expertise to EV charging opportunity, Donovan Energy dove enthusiastically into adding an EV charging offering as a complement to their comprehensive energy efficiency projects.

Looking to improve their EV project development approach, Donovan Energy explored digital methods to implement EV charging stations into their service offering.

To gain an inside perspective, the SnapCount Team spoke with Donovan Energy’s Solutions Manager Emma Loebker, who explained the evolution of their EVSE development process. Read on to learn how this industry leader leveraged software to manage EV charging station projects in a fraction of the time of traditional methods.

Background

At the forefront of the clean energy industry, Donovan Energy offers a broad range of energy services ranging from advisory project development to lighting retrofits and PACE financing. Recognizing the natural opportunity that EV charging equipment coupled with an energy efficiency project would present, Donovan Energy added an EV charging offering in 2018.

According to Emma, “our early efforts in assessing and quoting EV charging opportunities involved us jointly walking the site with our electrician, taking scores of pictures, and jotting down as many notes as we could. We would then upload all the information to a shared computer file where there was a lot of back-and-forth with the electrician to make sure we were all on the same page with respect to what the project needed. We would then need to wait for a quote from the electrician while getting pricing from our EV charging vendors. The whole thing involved a lot of moving parts and opened us up to error and delay.”

Aiming to streamline and accelerate their EV charging processes, Donovan Energy jumped on the opportunity to implement digital EV charging station projects with SnapCount’s EV charging capabilities in 2022.

SnapCount customers since 2017, Donovan aimed to implement a digital EV charging station solution with no interruption to their business. “Having already used SnapCount to complete lighting retrofit projects, we saw the EV charging capabilities as a no-brainer in hopes it would eliminate the time-consuming processes on the back end of the project. There was a very short learning curve to add this digital solution into our arsenal which was an added benefit” added Emma.

Upon implementing the digital process, the Donovan Energy team found an increase in efficiency within one central digital location to not only complete site audits, but also complete post-audit work including viewing and marking up project photos and videos and elimination of handwritten notes to create purchase orders and quotes. “It really goes back to having everything in one place. Photos, vendors, pricing, what material you’re using and even your notes are all in one digital place which greatly improves efficiency in our EV charging projects” said Loebker.

Prior to implementing SnapCount to manage their EV charging projects, the Donovan team had their fair share of frustrations with manual processes including uploading photos to an online drive, building cost sheets by hand, and scrambling to find the correct solution for the project. Utilizing SnapCount, they found that these frustrations were eliminated while project development and implementation timelines improved dramatically.

“It could take me over 2 hours, if not more, to build a quote depending on the type of solution we were aiming to provide prior to SnapCount. Now that we are using SnapCount for EV, I just add the correct material or solution directly into the cost sheet and it automatically generates the quote. It now takes me about 20 minutes, if not less, to generate a quote. The time savings is immense” said Loebker.

Donovan also experienced increased efficiencies on the purchase order side of the project with the elimination of a tracking spreadsheet and the integration with their accounting system, both of which helped reduce mistakes on the purchase order. “The purchase order functionality of SnapCount is huge because it allowed us to stop using the Google sheet we constantly had to update. Now we’re even integrated with Quickbooks through SnapCount, so our accounting team is happy with the elimination of copying data and the reduction of errors as well” said Loebker.