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Company
Services
Case Studies
Background
IBTS delivers third-party quality management services that ensure proper planning, implementation, and assessment of energy and sustainability projects. We enhance the capabilities of local, state, and federal governments, and private-sector organizations with customized access to subject matter expertise, technology solutions, training, and program support.
We provide services to local, state and federal governments, in addition to private-sector organizations.
IBTS’s energy and sustainability services can help your community, department or organization:
● Comply with energy codes without neglecting comfort or cost
● Reduce risks and increase the security of an energy project
● Build an energy efficient or green building
● Validate the productivity and safety of your solar PV system
● Take advantage of available resources
Solar FIT-QM: Using a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (DOE EERE)’s Solar Energy Technology Office, IBTS has significantly expanded its Field Inspection Technology Quality Management (FIT-QM) photovoltaic (PV) inspection platform. FIT-QM tracks data from tens of thousands of solar PV installations across the country, providing the industry with unparalleled regionally-specific data on installation quality, failures, and opportunities for optimizing efficiency.
Key Challenges:
FIT-QM is IBTS’ enterprise application being used by IBTS Inspectors and Quality Managers to evaluate a building’s safety with Role-based access. The intent of the application is to build a workflow for the Building Safety Evaluation wherein for each evaluation, an Inspector appointment is scheduled. The Inspector visits the property who then answers a series of questions based on a scoring system (Pass/Fail/ Action items (Critical/ Medium/ Low)). Based on the Inspector’s evaluation, Quality Manager reviews the evaluation and develops a report with recommendations and action items for the remediation of specific safety areas. IBTS wanted to enhance functionality to its FIT-QM cloud-based software platform related to the Forms, Form Builder, and Output Reports. Enhancements to the FIT-QM application were to be developed as configurable options within existing environment without affecting the current functionality.
While the core capabilities for FIT-QM include Information Capture, Scheduling/Dispatch, Custom Forms, integrated billing, and Online Reporting, 3 Major areas for enhancement were:
● Enhancement 1- PDF Output Report
● Enhancement 2 - Actions
● Enhancement 3 - Cascading Questions
Our Solution:
Old reports being developed lacked any action description. We used Google Firebase to build/revamp the PDF reports with a new look and feel using React.js and PDFKIT and also added Actions/ Strategies to be taken against critical safety issues and concerns.
We also created another Tab called ‘Actions’ for Admins and Clients to provide inputs regarding the strategy, cost and complexity for remediation of safety issues.In addition, we enhanced logics in the‘Rubrics’ Tab, and are currently working on enhancing the User Experience for evaluators by cascading the questions and thus reducing the overall form filling time by avoiding unnecessary/ inter-dependent/ branched questions.
Our team adopted an Agile-based development methodology to ensure rapid development and adaptability to IBTS. Our team established Daily Stand-ups, open office hour session within Project Team members, and Weekly Status Meetings to ensure strict adherence to the project schedule. We leveraged Atlassian JIRA for the project management and managing product backlog for rapid prototyping with mockups/wireframes.
FIT-QM Users:
Currently, 26 jurisdictions are working together to deliver services in the built environment
Populations from 4,000 to 25,000
Sunrun
Sunrun, one of the country’s largest solar service companies, developed an industry leading full-cycle quality management process designed to ensure maximum benefit for consumers and mitigate risks. The company partnered with IBTS to develop a process that helps enforce Sunrun’s high standards for installation quality across all partners and regions. Together, IBTS and Sunrun developed a process that helps enable the long-term success of the residential solar industry. Read more about IBTS’s partnership with Sunrun.
Community Energy Water Resilience Installations (CEWRI)
IBTS is supporting Tidal Basin Government Consulting, LLC (Tidal Basin) in the CEWRI work in Puerto Rico, funded through the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funding and administered through the Puerto Rico Department of Housing (PRDOH). The CEWRI program will provide up to 15,000 homes on the Island with solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. IBTS is playing an important role providing quality assurance to support these installations through field inspections.IBTS is also supporting the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) as a technical advisor to assist with training solar installers in Puerto Rico on behalf of the CEWRI program.
Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC)
As IREC’s industry outreach partner, IBTS is helping the organization prepare for and implement solutions for the Puerto Rican Solar Business Accelerator by working with IREC and stakeholders in implementing solutions to address the needs of the solar industry.IBTS is also supporting IREC as a SolSmart Advisor, providing community engagement, gap analysis, community applications, and technical assistance to six municipalities in Puerto Rico, which will become the first SolSmart designated communities on the Island.
Sunnova Energy International Inc.
Since 2013, IBTS has provided Sunnova’s engineering team with third party quality management services to satisfy their financing requirements. IBTS provides over a thousand inspections each year for Sunnova, and also supports the company’s renewable energy and installation quality goals in Puerto Rico.
Massachusetts’ Clean Energy Center (Mass CEC) Building Decarbonization
IBTS is a partner to Mass CEC, helping support the agency in reaching its building decarbonization priorities through services such as program strategy and development; technical expertise; monitoring & evaluation trainings; workforce development; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and marketing, outreach, and engagement. Source: https://www.ibts.org/what-we-do/energy-and-sustainability/
Pertinent Results:
The Allwyn team implemented an Agile approach providing speed and transparency to the business users as new functionality was being designed and built. We successfully delivered multiple releases within a 6-month period.Cascading questions helped IBTS save their Inspectors’ and Quality Managers’ time by avoiding unnecessary inter-dependent questions. Ability to provide Action Description as part of the output report allows the direct clients/ vendors to take necessary actions for the remediation of safety concerns. Increased user types and flow between users to facilitate AHJ inspection processes, streamlined the inspection process and ensured uniform and compliant results for Installers, Inspectors, Municipalities/ AHJ, Trainers, Code Officials, Component Manufacturers, First Responders, Financiers, and Engineers. FIT is scalable for large data collection and management and applicable in a range of municipal service areas such as fire, rescue, disaster recovery, and more. IBTS also has production support and automation using cypress framework in pipeline that we will be supporting with.
