Creating an expansive platform to manage all company data

The Energy Network 

Established in 1995 to work with business and industry, The Energy Network identifies the most cost-effective energy products on the market, and tailors them to suit individual business requirements.

The Energy Network helps manage clients’ energy consumption and minimises their overall spend by ensuring you use your energy as efficiently as possible.

They work on behalf of 800 customers, supported by a team of experienced and dedicated client managers, which guarantees the highest standard of account management.

Engaging with all stages of the process, they use trading screens to find the best opportunities for customers regarding when to buy, before getting involved with validating bills, checking data, consumption reduction measures, looking at a client’s whole carbon position and providing full support on anything to do with gas, electricity and water.

Project Background

Dealing with so much business-critical data on a daily basis, The Energy Network needed a tool that would enable them to manage not only this data, but also their financial information. 

A few years ago, the company had invested large amounts into a CRM solution for its operations. At the same time, they were also paying about £10,000 to have a bespoke system of screens made for the company. Employees never took to these tools, finding them inaccessible and ineffective. 

Spreadsheets had been prevalent in their operations too, but these proved increasingly chaotic and difficult for managing sensitive data.

At this point, they looked for a new solution. Gridfox facilitated the large data management required by The Energy Network, on top of time management requirements specified by the companies’ managing director, Stuart Mapp. 

The Build

Balancing both company and c-level requirements, The Energy Network required a number of tables to store data pertaining to different areas of the company (operations, PR, finances).  

The Energy Network found Gridfox to be intuitive and straightforward to use, which empowered them to innovate and create new solutions. Previous tools that the company had used had been too complicated to use, which equated to lost time and frustration. However, with Gridfox The Energy Network were able to  start building a project from scratch right away. 

Their first step was to compile a number of Tables containing essential project data. Configuring these tables with Fields like auto count, logo, text, number, currency, Day, Date, Time allowed the energy network to organise this data effectively. 

As they quickly became more comfortable with building their Gridfox project, The Energy Network were able to expand their setup with increasingly more sophisticated Parent-Child data relationships. 

Beginning with a company table, they were then able to add additional tables focused around sites, contacts, half hourly supply points, deliverables, guest supply points, good news stories, deals, company income and other essential company data. With all this data being stored in the cloud, they could also be confident that their information was being managed securely. 

Results

Some of the key benefits that The Energy Network found revolved around adaptability, accessibility and visibility. 

Adaptability was a key benefit because The Energy Network had the freedom to make “hands on” changes to their project meant that data could be updated as quickly as required. This has proven, particularly, useful when adding filters or subsets to specific tables — giving the company that next-level granular detail. 

The ability to link tables, in particular, meant that they could also have visibility over these intersecting areas of the company and make informed decisions as their projects developed. 

Workflows were made significantly more efficient through the use of filters. Now employee workload could be managed easily by filtering work according to the user that it was assigned. 

When it came to sharing data, either internally or with clients, The Energy Network benefited from the ability to import and export data from spreadsheets. When working with a car manufacturer, the Energy Network received a significant amount of Excel spreadsheets containing sensitive financial information.

With Gridfox’s export Data for Import feature, this large amount of data was quickly organised within 10 minutes. The company was able to export a Gridfox project into Excel, complete with all relevant headers, import the data, and then export it back to Gridfox. In addition to being a quick and effective process, it also optimised the view of this business-critical data. 

Key Features

• Used Holiday Planner template for essential business admin 
• Graphs for effective data visualisation
• Filters used to assign tasks to employees