How to Migrate from Legacy Solution Templates to Service Offerings

What Are "Legacy" Solution Templates and Why Change Them?

A "Legacy Solution Template" is any solution template created prior to the December 2018 release of SolarNexus when Service Offerings (along with Energy Storage systems) were released for general availability. Legacy solution templates were originally designed to support quoting of PV systems only. As such, these legacy solution templates lack mechanisms to dynamically create a larger scope of work that may include efficiency measures, energy storage, and any ancillary work (see more about Legacy Solution Templates here). The introduction of service offerings allows highly customized scopes of work to be quickly defined, priced, and dynamically populated into proposals and contracts without custom development work.

NOTE: The "Legacy" style of solution templates can no longer be created, however any solution templates already in existence can continue to be used.

Make a Plan

Its very beneficial to sketch out your plan BEFORE starting work within the SolarNexus application. Your plan should include:

1. List of service offerings, along with list of major product items that are needed to be shown in proposal and/or contract docs
2. Determine doc template needs.
   1. Will SolarNexus provided proposal and/or contract docs work?
   2. Do you want to update existing custom template docs? What will they look like? (think modularity)
3. Review SolarNexus pre-defined service offerings, can you use any of them?

Migrate Legacy Gross Price Solution Templates to Service Offerings

The process below describes the recommended steps to transition your legacy Gross Price Input solution template(s) to new service offerings and solution templates:

A. IF solution template has pre-defined PV systems, and/or EE Measures:

1. Create a new service offering for each PV or EE Measure.
2. IF EE Measure, input default energy savings (same as defined in legacy solution template).
3. If EE Measure has any major equipment to list, add the item(s).
4. Edit Gross Price and input a default starting amount.
5. Repeat steps for each additional EE Measure.

B. IF solution template has a pre-defined set of scope values that drive custom proposal / contract output:*

1. Create new service offerings for each scope value, and ensure that the "type" value associated with each service offering corresponds to the exact same scope currently used in the legacy solution template.
2. Add any major equipment items, specify any optional products for each item.
3. Repeat for each scope value.

* - Note: Your existing proposal and contract document templates should be unaffected since the new service offerings will auto-add the same scope values to the solution when created.

C. (Optional) Create a new solution template and add the new service offerings that should always be included.

D. Inactivate legacy solution template.

Migrate Legacy Cost Item Solution Templates to Service Offerings

The process below describes the recommended steps to transition your legacy solution template to new service offerings and solution templates.

A. Create Service Offerings for pre-defined PV systems, and/or EE Measures

1. Create a new service offering for each PV or EE Measure.
2. Add existing cost items for PV system to the new PV system service offering's cost item group(s).

B. IF the solution template contains additional Cost Item Groups that represent different systems that could be added to the solution, do these steps for each cost item group that represents a different service:

1. Create a new service offering.
2. Add any major equipment items, specify any optional products for each item.
3. Add same set of cost items to the new service offering's cost item group(s).*
4. Repeat for each service.

* - Note: DO NOT add products that are major items to the cost item groups. When user creates a solution with the service offering, s/he selects one of the available product options for the item. It is then sync'd to the cost item list in same way that modules and inverters are sync'd.

C. (Optional) Create a new solution template and add the new service offerings that should always be included.

D. Inactivate legacy solution template.

NOTE: If your cost item based legacy solution template has a pre-defined set of scope values that drive custom proposal / contract output, the new service offerings you create should be given the exact same set of service "types" that are already in use. Your existing proposal and contract document templates should be unaffected since the new service offerings will auto-add the same scope values to the solution when created.

Benefits of Service Offerings vs Solution Templates

Service Offerings introduce a comprehensive way to quote virtually any type of work. Benefits versus the Legacy Solution Templates include:

• Quickly and easily mix and match a variety of company provided services into a single customer solution.
• Define individual scopes of work for each service, including major items and eligible lists of products to select for each.
• Clearer Gross Input pricing - separate input amounts for each service instead of having to add together multiple prices and input a single bundled number.
• Quicker cost item pricing configuration - only need to review cost items associated with services included, rather than listing all possible ones and deleting (or setting to zero qty) any that are unneeded.
• SolarNexus knows how to define and manage different categories of services that affect the client's energy use (i.e. PV produces energy, Energy Storage stores and and discharges energy at various times, and Energy Efficiency reduces energy consumption). These are important aspects of analyzing the project's economic value to the customer.
• Document Templates can be standardized to dynamically output a variety of services to proposals and contracts without customization. No need to manually edit contracts to capture scopes of work.
• Separate names and scope of work descriptions for each service. Easy to edit and populate custom scope information from the UI. Proposals and contracts automatically include the names and descriptions of services included in the solution's scope of work (no need to rely on custom fields to output a detailed scope of work into proposals and contracts).
• Each service can have its own set of "major items" to include in output to proposals and contracts.
• Can manually add ad-hoc services to a solution
• Separation of pricing for each service makes it easy to price services individually:
  • Input a separate gross price for PV System vs MSP Replacement
  • PV System price per watt now ONLY contains the pricing attributed to the PV system instead of full solution price
• Easily apply incentives to individual services included in the solution
• No need to manually populate "scope" values, SolarNexus automatically does this based on service(s) added to solution