Helping families reap the rewards of solar technology

Insightly makes it easier for Bright Planet Solar to achieve enhanced profitability through business process automation.

Bright Planet Solar is a solar installation company that provides high quality, affordable, American-made photovoltaic technology. Founded in 2014, the company’s “triple bottom line” approach strives to maintain a healthy balance of profit, people, and the planet. With decades of hands-on expertise in solar installation and support, Bright Planet Solar has become an emerging leader in the alternative energy industry.

As the company rapidly grew into a midsized company with multiple locations across the country, Bright Planet Solar needed a better way to manage relationships, projects, and employees. “We tried Salesforce CRM, but it was not functional for our evolving business model,” said Nell Jungels, Director of IT at Bright Planet Solar. “As a result, we moved everything into Smartsheet, which also had its limitations.”

Single source of truth for projects

At first, the switch to Insightly seemed like a short-term decision. “We hit a breaking point with our former project management system and needed a temporary solution while we fig

Insightly is extremely flexible and adaptable to the changing needs of our business.

ured out our long-term plans,” Jungels said. “After evaluating several solutions, we decided on Insightly because of its G Suite integration.”

Upon implementation, the team realized just how powerful Insightly could be. “Record linking simplifies the tracking of complex relationships with our sales and funding partners,” Jungels said. “Insightly has become the primary source of truth for projects because it organizes everything in an intuitive way.”

And, although Insightly is not a solar-specific CRM, the system is easily customizable to any industry or market. “Custom fields allow us to track data that is specific to the solar industry,” Jungels said.

Total transparency

Insightly dashboards are vital to the company’s ongoing success. “Dashboards are fantastic,” Jungels said. “Insightly has essentially replaced our need for Power BI by delivering visually engaging dashboards directly within the user interface.” Senior management and department leaders rely on dashboards to monitor high-level KPIs, such as order volume, sales partner performance, and warehouse efficiency.

Advanced reports keep things running smoothly. “Each team has its own set of Insightly reports to manage,” Jungels said. “As a company, we have at least 200 Insightly reports that are used every single day.”

Finely-grained filtering makes Insightly reports especially useful. “Compared to other CRMs, Insightly’s filters are very specific and provide a detailed look at each project and relationship,” Jungels said.

Automation through integration

Bright Planet Solar now enjoys a more productive workforce, thanks to Insightly’s integrated automation. “Insightly’s API is powerful,” Jungels said. “We leverage the API to take workflow automation to the next level.”

Case in point, Bright Planet Solar has automated virtually every aspect of the project lifecycle. “As projects advance through the pipeline, workflow automation ensures a seamless handoff between team members,” Jungels said. “For example, if a permit date is entered, Insightly automatically moves the project to the next stage and loops in the appropriate people.”

PandaDoc integration eliminates manual data entry bottlenecks. “The solar industry has a lot of paperwork involved,” Jungels said. “The PandaDoc integration allows us to move faster, reduce human oversight, and increase productivity.”

Sharing information with outside parties is also easier with Insightly. “Because Insightly’s API is so well written, we can easily push data to outside tools that are accessible by our sales partners,” Jungels said. “When proposals are created, our sales partners receive an automatic email containing the proposal and relevant customer information,” Jungels said.

The company even uses Insightly to automate various aspects of its supply chain. “For our two warehouses in California, we created a webhook that automatically checks our zip code database and populates information into a custom field,” Jungels said. “Employees rely on this information to filter projects by warehouse, which is a huge time saver.”

Custom objects offer additional flexibility

Insightly’s custom objects feature is changing how Bright Planet Solar serves its customers. “Our customer service program has been transformed by Insightly custom objects,” Jungels said. “As customer service inquiries are received, we simply fill out a webform and Insightly takes it from there.”

After the form is submitted, the Insightly workflow initiates a Lambda function to run, automatically creating the custom object in Insightly. “Tracking service tickets as custom objects keeps everything under one roof and delivers the reports we need to manage our service program,” Jungels said.

Scalable for the future

Looking ahead, Insightly will play a key role at Bright Planet Solar. “Insightly’s best selling point is its flexibility,” Jungels said. “Features such as custom fields, workflow automation, email templates, record linking, and advanced reporting have helped us grow, and they’ll continue to do so in the future.”