"Plan sets used to take 3 weeks. Now we go from survey to a stamped plan set in 3 days with zero revisions.”
How Solar Energy Services Cut
Project Timelines By 80%+
With Scanifly
Solar Energy Services (SES) was founded in 2006 with the goal of delivering high-quality solar systems to customers.
Company leaders also want to invest in both their team and local community, though some inefficiencies in the surveying process made that difficult in the past.
Scanifly helped the team eliminate revisions and shorten the project lifecycle by 2+ weeks, adding the capacity and resources SES needed to further invest in its community.
“[Scanifly] allows us to sustain existing costs while increasing scale to build more consistent profitability.”
-Ethan Goddard, Vice President of Energy Technology
Results From Using Scanifly:
In revisions using Scanifly
From survey to stamps; reduced from 10-20 days
In site survey capacity
using Scanifly
The Challenge: Building an Efficient,
People-First Solar Company
By the time Roger Perry founded Solar Energy Services (SES) in 2006, he’d already been in the industry for nearly 30 years. Entering the solar industry in 1978 with solar pool heating systems, he built a wealth of experience that helped SES take off from day one.
As the company grew, however, the challenge emerged of keeping up with demand, while continuing to provide top-notch quality to customers.
In particular, the manual process of surveying created issues:
Time: Manual surveying processes meant the team could only complete 1-2 per day maximum.
Safety: Climbing on the roof created safety risks for Surveyors.
Comprehensiveness: Some roof planes were inaccessible, meaning teams couldn’t measure everything by hand.
Accuracy: Working by hand with pen and paper–while trying to stay stable on the roof–led to documentation challenges.
Using manual methods, it took 2-3 weeks to go from a survey to a plan set and could easily be hit with even bigger delays.
“If the measurements that we took in the field and wrote down on a piece of paper weren’t perfect, we could end up going to the site, rolling crews out, and then getting a call from our crew leader saying we’re going to lose a panel,” said Ethan Goddard, VP of Energy Technology at SES.
Yet the company wanted to speed up its process so people could invest more time in community initiatives like the Amicus Solar community and installing more solar for lower-income housing.
Realizing the value of an accurate survey—both in terms of customer experience and saving hours for the team—SES leadership looked for a better solution.
The Solar Energy Services team ultimately chose Scanifly, which provided the significant efficiency bump that allowed SES to invest in its community more than it had in the past.
Saving Hours & Dollars with Scanifly
The Solar Energy Services team was drawn to Scanifly because it offered the full package: drones with Scanifly’s mobile app made surveys safer and more accurate while Scanifly’s Solar Design Services and core platform meant high-quality, Engineer-stamped plan sets faster than ever before.
Scanifly solved the aforementioned issues of time, safety, comprehensiveness, and accuracy, but did so in a more nuanced and holistic way than other solutions.
Here’s how the SES team leveraged Scanifly to save time and money:
1. Surveyor Capacity & Safety: Pre-Scanifly, the team would regularly need to send two surveyors to every job and possibly conduct another truck roll if there were any redesigns.
With Scanifly, only one surveyor is necessary and drones capture full site context, meaning no additional truck rolls. Surveyors can also do more volume because it takes only 10 minutes on average to fly a site using drones.
“We might have been able to do one or two site visits a day… now we can do two to four,” said Ethan. “It allows us to sustain our existing costs while increasing scale to build more consistent profitability, and use that extra money to invest in the business.”
2. Centralized Data: Before Scanifly, the team took photos on their phones and had hand-drawn measurements that needed to be sent to Designers.
With Scanifly’s mobile app, everything is captured and centralized, making small adjustments simple.
“All the information is always in the same place,” said Ethan. “It doesn’t get lost in the noise. It makes it really easy for admin changes or module dimension changes. It’s been a really big improvement for us.”
3. Survey Accuracy: Pre-Scanifly, the SES team conducted the best surveys they could with manual methods. However, sometimes mistakes happened in translating data from the field to design, or when certain roof planes were inaccessible.
Scanifly now helps the team capture 100% of the roof planes with equal accuracy to hand measurements.
“I was reluctant at first because I’m used to pulling a tape measure,” said Kevin Hoang, Project Manager at SES. “After a few projects we’ve flown with Scanifly, I’m pretty blown away by the accuracy and how many fewer revisions we had to go back and deal with.”
4. Working with Scanifly Design Services: SES’s in-house teams regularly worked with third-party designers using spreadsheets, email, and disjointed processes to manage post-sale designs and permitting. However, they found both delivery timelines and work quality to be inconsistent across their design consultants.
Ethan and the SES team chose Scanifly Design Services to centralize and streamline designs and engineering docs on one platform. This enables them to easily order customized post-sale design outputs with the click of a button from within their Scanifly account.
Working with Scanifly Design Services as a single provider, SES now gets consistently high-quality plan sets within 48 hours (or less).
“Drafting in-house took much longer,” said Ethan. “The turnaround time [with Scanifly Design Services] is tremendous.”
"Plan sets used to take 3 weeks. Now we go from survey to a stamped plan set in 3 days with zero revisions,” said Ethan.
Working with Scanifly has even opened new business opportunities for SES as customers (and their friends and neighbors) are fascinated by drone technology.
“Customers are pretty wow’ed,” said Ethan. “Solar is high-tech; when customers see us bringing out high-tech equipment, that instills trust.”
Driving Community Investment Through Business Efficiency
A key to Solar Energy Services’ growth has been team and community investment. That’s always happened, but now the team has more time and resources to dedicate to it.
Before Scanifly, a project used to take 14-21 days to go from survey to plan set. That timeline is now down to 3-4 days with Scanifly. With the hours Scanifly saves the team, SES is able to continue to grow the business, be more active in the Amicus Solar community, and start building solar developments in lower-income areas.