Sonnen & Boldare – 4 successful years, and counting…
–Boldare stood out as a company who really wanted to understand our problem and fulfil our needs – Norbert Baumann, VP Research & Development, Sonnen. When a client says this after a four-year collaboration involving up to 47 people, we can’t help but feel proud of what we achieved together. Let us tell you the story of sonnen and Boldare – from helping out with an online platform to organization-wide digital transformation.
Table of contents
Who are sonnen?
With headquarters in Wildpoldsried, Germany, sonnen is a full-service renewable energy provider. Using photovoltaic cells and specialized storage batteries, sonnen users can produce, store and share their own electricity within the sonnen community. sonnen is a global leader in residential energy storage and offers its customers 100% independence from traditional energy suppliers.
What brought sonnen and Boldare together?
Having begun in 2010, producing home storage batteries, by 2017, sonnen was looking to make the shift from hardware supplier to full-service energy supplier. This strategy began against the backdrop of an extremely competitive market, a compound supply chain for customers across varying time zones, a number of third-party suppliers, and high (and increasing) volumes of users, traffic and data.
The first big step was updating the Customer Portal – a web app platform for sonnen customers – to enable easier energy management. But to develop this to schedule, sonnen needed additional support for its internal software teams.
Following the Portal, the need to improve the sales process, increase customer satisfaction and give more control and transparency over the sales process via sonnen’s partners would lead us to collaborating on a digital transformation process.
In the words of Norbert Baumann, sonnen’s VP Research & Development,
With our long experience of practical, agile working and digital transformation, Boldare were the perfect match…
Getting to know each other
For our first collaboration – the customer portal – we worked with sonnen to produce an MVP (minimum viable product) for release within just two months; with new features, simpler user interface and experience, faster loading times, and improved customer satisfaction. (For more details of this initial work, read the case study here.)
After the success of the new portal, the company’s rapid growth soon meant that sonnen needed to scale their teams and business while improving the integrity of their B2B2C services; including scaling their software teams from 40 people to more than 100.
After a comprehensive needs analysis, we suggested a digital transformation in two parts, tailored to the needs of sonnen’s digital department:
- Further enhancing the user experience to improve the sales process, reduce service complexity, increase customer satisfaction and give more control and transparency over the sales process
- Implement agile working to better address the needs of sonnen’s customers, markets, and employees
The key mechanism to success would be setting up an intercompany transformation team, with specialist members from both sonnen and Boldare; and the use of Nexus scrum as a methodology to coordinate multiple agile projects at once.
The results so far
Between 2017 and early 2021, Boldare has helped sonnen to build and improve the following applications:
- B2C Customer Portal – users manage sonnenBatterie household batteries.
- B2C sonnenCharger app – supporting a household device to charge EVs (electric vehicles).
- B2B2C internal platform – supporting collaboration with B2B partners (handling of documentation and contracts, offer generation, supply chain management, etc.)
Boldare supported sonnen with multiple development teams, working hand in hand with their in-house and other external teams. By working so closely, we acted as agile and digital transformation consultants, always with a focus on producing concrete outputs in the shape of high-quality digital products that supported sonnen’s established KPIs.
At the busiest times in our collaboration, we had 47 experts dedicated to sonnen projects (almost half of all developers working for sonnen), 12 mixed (internal and external) development teams working on sonnen projects, translating to up to 6500 hours of work monthly. (For more details of sonnen’s digital transformation, read the case study here.)
Summary
After a highly successful initial project, Boldare and sonnen worked together to digitally transform the company’s digital department – from needs analysis to solution proposal to implementation. Once a traditional hierarchy, today that digital department is self-organizing, agile and product-driven. For sonnen’s customers, stakeholders and suppliers, the user experience was also transformed, and the internal operations and supply chains optimized.
Today, sonnen builds its own in-house scrum teams that continue the development and maintenance of their digital products and we, as Boldare, still play an important role as a software development service provider and Agile consultants.
For more information about how Boldare could help your organization with digital transformation, you can hear it from Michael Konder, VP Digital Solutions at sonnen, in this video.
And if you’re curious how it feels to become a member of Boldare team and cooperate with sonnen, visit our career page and check the current vacancies!
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