Background
Arcadia Solar has been doing residential installs for more than 11 years. This family-owned company takes great pride in their customer-focused process—setting themselves apart by providing high-touch service and ensuring that customers are kept updated on every project milestone.
That dedication to the customer experience is enabling them to grow rapidly, with plans to expand from their current locations around the Southwest into additional markets across California, New Mexico, and Texas.
For Danny Murphy, Arcadia Solar’s Director of Construction, ensuring that installs are completed as efficiently as possible is the number one goal. So he invests in the technology and automation tools they need to manage projects across multiple markets, complete more installs with fewer staff, and scale the business without losing focus on the customer.
EagleView’s Inform data solutions, including Inform Advanced and Inform Essentials+, have been key to helping Arcadia Solar achieve their growth goals by increasing efficiency and automating workflows.
“EagleView provides us with the data we need to do our jobs more efficiently while providing an excellent customer experience.”
Challenge
Prior to using EagleView, initial planning site visits and design steps were done completely manually, and were far more time intensive.
“It would take as long as four to five staff hours from the point of the job coming in, to us having an AutoCAD that we could start placing panels on,” Danny explained.
To start off each project, Arcadia’s internal design department would need to find a Google Earth image of the house, and then create a basic 2D schematic wireframe of the roof in AutoCAD. This step alone could take as long as 30 minutes to complete.
Next, the site visit tech would need to travel to the property and measure all of the roof dimensions in order to make sure that the designers had a scaled and accurate model of the roof. That one site visit could take at least an hour for a simple roof, and as much as two and a half hours for a more complex roof.
Finally, it would take at least another hour for a design engineer to manually enter all the measurements and obstruction data into AutoCAD, get a final roof layout, and add panels into the design.
Solution
Danny noticed that Arcadia’s roofing partners that used EagleView were turning around proposals really fast.
“I heard about the great tools EagleView has. But I was wondering how accurate the measurements were going to be. So I got some demos and ran a couple of test projects, and compared EagleView’s data to our hand measured results. When I saw that the measurements were within just a couple of inches, I was immediately sold on how EagleView could help us work much more efficiently.”
Now Arcadia no longer has to invest staff hours for measuring properties or creating each initial roof wireframe. They also save multiple hours on every job by eliminating the need to send staff back to a site to re-measure or verify roof dimensions.
Impact
4-5
hours saved on every job
2x
workload capacity (from 4-5 visits to 8-10 visits a day)
With EagleView’s Inform data solutions, including Inform Advanced and Inform Essentials+, Arcadia was able to transform the way they do business. They’ve freed up valuable time and energy that can be refocused on providing a high-touch customer experience, and are able to scale at a cheaper cost.
“We’re able to complete far more site visits and solar designs, and have doubled our workload capacity. Before EagleView, site techs were doing just four to five visits in a typical workday. Now they’re doing eight to ten.”
Rather than needing to manually measure each roof, Arcadia can now simply send in an address, and EagleView provides a 3D model of the home with all the information they need in a format that can go directly into AutoCAD—making it a lot faster and easier to provide accurate quotes and estimates.
“Because of EagleView, I can focus more time on the customer experience. And by limiting staff hours to where they’re most needed, I’m also saving on soft costs like additional employees and insurance.”
