Verse accelerates product time-to-market with Arcadia's utility data
Using Arcadia’s high-quality, global utility data, Verse offers unprecedented transparency into energy usage and costs across multi-site enterprise organizations.
Use case
Develop a corporate energy management application and accelerate time-to-market.
Challenge
Many businesses struggle to access their utility data, which makes it difficult to take informed action on energy and sustainability goals. They’re often left using manual processes, parsing error-prone spreadsheets, and making broad assumptions based on data from just a few of their many sites. Verse set out to address this issue with their Utility Bill Management (UBM) application, but needed access to their customers’ actual utility data — real-time and historical — to do so.
“It is extremely difficult to collect utility data in a streamlined way. You essentially have to try and parse a number of PDF files with formats that vary widely from provider to provider and can be changed on a whim. It’s a monumental task to collect all of the necessary information in an accurate way.”
Solution
To meet the need for accurate, streamlined utility data, Verse integrated Arcadia’s data platform into its UBM application. Arcadia automatically aggregates and standardizes detailed energy data from a global network of utility providers, enabling Verse to seamlessly connect individual user accounts. Using this data, the UBM application provides a single, cohesive view of a customer’s energy usage and costs across all locations and providers. The application adds data structuring to improve reporting and ease of use, as well as advanced analytics to detect anomalies and enhance energy benchmarking and forecasting. It also syncs with Verse’s other applications to guide energy investment prioritization and procurement decisions.
Benefits
Verse has a highly skilled but lean engineering team, so they partnered with Arcadia to ensure a rapid launch. This gave the team instant access to the datasets they needed, resulting in significant time and cost savings.
“It’s staggering to see how manual and fragmented the utility data collection process is for many companies. By combining our software-focused suite of energy management solutions with Arcadia’s powerful utility data, we’ve created a unique opportunity to better serve organizations that are looking to reduce energy costs and emissions.”
The Story
Verse is a software company whose energy management software platform helps organizations reduce their energy costs and emissions. To that end, their development team wanted to create a UBM application that allows customers to identify sites with the highest utility spend and emissions so they can better target efforts to reduce energy usage and achieve their climate goals.
When Verse set out to develop the UBM app, the team knew it needed access to highly accurate and comprehensive utility bill data. However, tapping into thousands of utility providers and pulling data across thousands of individual accounts was a daunting task.
Verse’s engineers quickly realized that building this capability internally would be costly and time-consuming. They went on to consider multiple utility data providers but ultimately chose Arcadia because of its broad provider coverage.
Using Arcadia’s comprehensive utility data, Verse helps organizations understand their energy spend and take meaningful action toward their decarbonization goals.
The UBM application structures customer data to improve visibility and reporting — for instance, calendarizing utility bills for easy monthly reporting, expressing total costs in a single currency, and classifying costs so customers can understand specific utility bill charges (e.g., T&D, usage, etc.). The application also delivers advanced analytics, including: automated anomaly detection; energy price and emissions forecasting to inform power procurement planning and budgeting; energy benchmarking to identify cost-saving opportunities; and emissions evaluation for sustainability reporting.
