Enegen See Pros and Cons in Remote Working
I had an interesting conversation with Enegen’s David Calmonson this week. He reports that things may have slowed a little in terms of UK power and software in recent weeks, perhaps as we go into the summer, versus how busy it was a couple of months ago. Despite it getting a little slower, Enegen is involved in a number of ongoing sales opportunities and busy, he told me. Interest in its ATOM product (Trading optimization and Asset Scheduling Software for decentralized Electricity Markets) remains very high, he said. Indeed, the company is recruiting currently in the areas of business analysts and developers.
We discussed various trends and while David sees a general preference for cloud and subscriptions for all its software solutions, he says an exception to that is the Generation Monitoring Module of Genstar4 that displays the ‘contract against actual position’ for the operational staff and is desktop-based as this has been client preference for customization, responsiveness & general display GUI features. The Genstar4 suite “helps traders balance their portfolios and generators, aggregators, VLPs, and asset operators to participate in the balancing mechanism and interact with National Grid ESO via EDT, EDL, or Wider Access.”
For me though, what was the most interesting part of the discussion was around remote selling and deployment. “Everything we have done has been remote of course,” he said. “It’s been very successful as well so far. But the area where I have concern is around existing customers and customer interaction where it is much more difficult to maintain effective social relationships as we have not been able to meet.”
Things are starting to change now of course, and David expects to start meeting face to face with customers again in the next few weeks. “To be honest, we have saved a considerable amount of money as well in not having to travel and stay in hotels and so on,” he said. “But the biggest thing has been the extra time it has afforded us and how we have been able to do more and respond to more queries as a result.” The last point is intriguing. He used an example where they did 7 demonstrations for a prospect but each took an hour or so and after the initial preparation, not much more work was needed. By contrast, traveling to the prospect’s site, staying overnight, and so on would have taken several days of additional time.
Plainly there are pros and cons around remote working and different stakeholders in the sales/procurement or deployment process will have different perspectives. However, time savings is one that no one else had mentioned to me in the various briefings I have done and I find that interesting. I would agree with David as despite not traveling much, by comparison, our travel has gone to zero and that does translate into time savings and the opportunity to get more done.
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