As we’re wrapping up this year, we wanted to share an outlook of what we believe will be the priorities for installing and maintaining renewable energy solutions in 2023. This outlook is based on our work with installers of solar systems, heat pumps, energy storage systems, and EV charging solutions. The priorities depend on the business and type of renewable energy itself. Some installers want to focus on scaling the number of standardized installations. Other installers are looking to add new products or enter new markets. Let’s dive deeper into three areas that will be important for renewable energy installers in 2023.
1) Scaling the number of standardized installations
- Situation in 2022
- With the sharp demand uptick in the market in 2022, many companies were taking on all kinds of installation projects
- Optimization was mostly done for the top of the funnel to capture the growing demand
- Challenges
- This lead to suboptimal margins, inefficient project management, and a lack of standardizing internal processes
- The current financial environment is putting pressure on companies to sharpen their focus on profitability and efficiency
- Take-away
- Some companies will define more precisely which installations projects they want to focus on. This helps them to standardize processes along the installation project
- Standardization and automation are important to increase profit margins and to increase the productivity of your installers
2) Adding new products such as heatpumps
- Situation in 2022
- As demand in the market is growing, many companies are adding new products such as heat-pumps or wallboxes
- By adding new products, they can capture additional revenue streams and increase the average revenue per customer
- Challenges
- Adding new products will require changes to supply-chains, installer capacity, and internal processes
- Many products have a higher complexity to install besides solar. Installers need to start from scratch how to achieve operational excellence for these new types of energy solutions
- Take-away:
- We recommend to start small and step-by-step to learn fast.
- Take an iterative approach where you are optimizing your processes over time. We do not recommend to build a fully fledged solution with rigid processes from the get-go
3) Managing incidents and maintenance
- Situation in 2022
- As the number of installations in the field increase, so do the incidents and maintenance requests from end-customers
- Challenges
- Managing incidents and maintenance creates additional complexity. Installers need to look into how they can efficiently manage and solve incidents quickly
- It is hard to find partners who are keen to do maintenance work in the current market environment. They can usually make more money by focusing on installations rather than by providing services
- Take aways
- Installers need to get an overview of all incidents and create an audit trail. By tracking incidents, they can learn over time how to optimize the most frequent service requests
- The feedback from these incidents needs to circle back to other teams to improve your products and operations
Given the strong demand in the market, 2023 will be a very interesting year for installers. We believe that the companies with the right balance of growth and profit will benefit strongly from the market tailwind. We’re looking forward to support them with Kwest.
