How to Add Utility Interconnection Process to Your Project Milestones

This article explains the specific steps to adding project milestones for tracking the Utility Interconnection process within your overall project milestone processes. See the Managing Your Company Processes Using Milestones article for general information. This article builds on that article for the specific Utility Interconnection process. Its a great example process to add for almost all SolarNexus companies.

Step 1 - Create "Utility Interconnection" Milestone Group

All milestones belong in a grouping that defines a sub-process within your overall project processes. It allows you to quickly filter and see the status of only the steps involved in the particular process you are interested in. The steps are simple:

1. Go to the Administration > Project Milestones screen.
2. At the top, click on the Show By Group radio button. You'll see the current groups (aka sub-processes) that are currently defined.
3. Check that you haven't already defined a "Utility Interconnection" group.
4. Click the "Add Group" button at the top of the screen. Enter "Utility Interconnection" for the name of the group and click "Save."

Now you have a container group to hold the milestones relevant to this sub-process.

Step 2 - Define Overview of Process Steps

Prior to inputting the individual milestones in SolarNexus, we recommend creating a quick overview list of your process steps first. Remember that a milestone is a distinct completion point in a process, marking when a next step can proceed.

Here's a typical set of process milestones for a Utility Interconnection process:

1. NEM agreement and customer authorization submitted
2. Interconnection application submitted
3. PTO Granted

Step 3 - Define First Process Step, "Submit Interconnection Application"

After adding the Utility Interconnection group. Return to the top of the Milestones screen and click the "Show In Display Order" radio button. Now we can add individual milestones.

1. Click the "Add Milestone" button
2. Complete the milestone definition form for the first milestone:
   1. Completed Name - "NEM Agreement and Customer Authorization Submitted"
   2. Incomplete Name - "Submit NEM Agreement and Customer Authorization"
   3. Milestone group - Utility Interconnection
   4. Description and Criteria - Input a description that can tell your employee what is expected to be complete for this milestone to be considered complete. For example, "Agreement & Customer Authorization Form successfully submitted through the PG&E online application."
   5. Predecessor - If the utility requires the system size, and it can't be easily updated later, you will probably want to wait until after the permit design is complete, so select "Permit Application Submitted." Or if you can submit immediately following the sale, choose "Sold."
   6. Default User to assign - If you have a dedicated person on your team who does all of these, select that person. Whenever a project gets to this point in the process, that person will automatically be assigned and notified.
   7. Statuses - Pending
   8. Assign Project Roles Upon Completion / Results in a Scheduled Event are not applicable.
   9. Update Close Probability - This is disabled because the milestone's predecessor is after the sale.
   10. Milestone is a Scheduled Event - Not applicable.
   11. Set Completion Deadline - Do you have an expectation of how many days & hours this task should take to complete? If so, you can set a timeout so that if the milestone is not completed in the given timeframe, SolarNexus will notify somebody. The intent is to make sure that no key process steps are forgotten. Remember, that the clock only starts ticking at the point that the predecessor is completed. So in this case, if the predecessor was when the Permit Application is Submitted, then the clock will start ticking then.
   12. Third Party Notifications - Use this feature to notify your customer (or another party) when this milestone is completed. In this example for the PG&E utility, the utility's application uses Docusign to get the customer's signature. As the installer I want to send the customer an Email that explains to the customer that they need to E-sign the authorization from PG&E, and if they don't get it, to notify us immediately. To use this feature, we need to create the Email template using the Document Templates functionality.
   13. Project Inclusion - If all of your projects include PV, its fine to leave as "All." However, you may have some projects that don't require Interconnection steps. In that case, create a rule that only this milestone is relevant if "Sold Solution Scope" includes "Grid-Tie PV".
3. Click the "Save" button.

Step 4 - Define Additional Milestones

Use the same process described above to define additional process milestones. We've provided sample recommended configurations in the table below for the milestones in our example process.