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Solar Power in Africa

Launched a management platform for a PAYG (Pay as You Go) solar power provider, improving lives across Africa

solar power

The Story

The client was looking for a multitenant software platform with CRM, inventory management, and warranty modules that would enable a pay-as-you-go payment model for their customers and that would integrate easily and securely with mobile payment and SMS providers.

About the project

The client is a global leader and pioneer in delivering affordable solar-powered solutions to households and small businesses in the developing world without access to reliable energy.

Symphony was responsible for the design, solution architecture, development, and maintenance of the platform that acknowledges mobile payment transactions, calculates customer payment wallets, and dispatches corresponding SMS messages to the customers.

Building a platform from scratch

Our team worked with the client's management, acting as their development department to extract requirements for building a new platform. We built environments, established development processes (Scrum), wrote documentation for new features, and handled all tech roles from solution architecture to QA.

We developed a pay-as-you-go software solution and the infrastructure to support the client's latest solar energy product. The backend was written in Java deployed in AWS infrastructure and had integrations with various mobile payment service and SMS gateway providers and aggregators.

Tracking and storage Android app

Symphony built an Android app for tracking and storage of inventory, from warehouses to dealers. We ensured high performance in low bandwidth networks and the ability to handle operations in areas without an internet connection.

Customer support portal

For administrative and customer support services, our team developed a customer support web portal that contains asset inventory and an in-depth payment reporting andanalytics tool. We enabled data visualization and facilitated reporting using custom modules. Since the portal has a fully responsive design, it is also used by field sales agents to track geolocation data of every registration via smartphones and similar devices.

Further improvements

Since the system was built, the number of features has tripled. We made sure that the architecture was flexible to easily accommodate the rapid growth. Symphony also developed a Wikipedia-style knowledge base that allows document owners to easily upload and share their work.

The Outcome

  • Delivered power to over 100 million households
  • Served over 70 countries