Cooking up change: Essent's recipe for a high- performance Energy Meter Platform.

• With rising energy prices and solar panels becoming mainstream, delivering real-time energy data has become a crucial unique value point for energy companies.

• Essents IT must adapt quickly to accommodate the sudden surge in users seeking real-time, concise insights into their energy consumption.

• With the old platform only 40% of the meter readings were available within 24 hours.

• Experts from Dataworkz, Smartworkz and Infraworkz joined Essents Team Metermasters to help transitioning the current system to a modern event-based streaming architecture.

What was your biggest challenge?

Imagine a bustling restaurant, its kitchen a symphony of sizzling pans, chopping knives, and the rhythmic clatter of dishes. Amidst this culinary chaos, the chefs face a daunting task: revamping the entire menu while keeping the restaurant open and customers satisfied.

This is akin to the challenge faced by our team: rewriting a complex software system while ensuring business continuity. The existing code, a tangled mess of interdependencies, resembled a plate of overcooked spaghetti, its strands stubbornly clinging together.

What was the solution?

To tackle this conundrum, Team Metermasters adopted a strategy akin to a skilled chef's meticulous preparation. We carefully divided the system into manageable portions. By rewriting these portions one by one, we ensured that the overall system remained functional. Key to this approach was to meticulously compare the outcome of each rewritten portion with the real outcome of the original system.

What was the result?

We have a clean working kitchen and data that normally needed 6 hours to cook was now ready for its customers in 2 seconds.

What did you like best?

At first, we were able to make (relatively) minor changes to the system that had drastic positive effects in terms of functionality, knowledge about the system and cloud costs reduction; we went from having incidents every single day to one every week or month in the span of roughly half a year. In the end, the only complaint we got was that the new system was too fast compared to the old one, as customers were seeing the new (more detailed) data before the old data was available.

What did you learn?

• Incremental change: break down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks to ensure continuous progress.

• Pick the right tools for the right job: Always look into what the best tools are for the job instead of choosing the one tool that does everything.

• Design for changes: in something so dynamic as the energy market, designing the system that you can make changes fast and easy is the key to success.

• Testing and quality assurance: rigorously test each component to ensure overall system stability.

• By embracing these principles, you can tackle even the most daunting software revamps, ensuring that your business remains operational and customers satisfied, even amidst the chaos of change.