"Douglas & Company was instrumental in building the technology infrastructure to take our mission critical stored energy monitoring business global.

They helped us migrate our operation from it's initial incarnation to a reliable, efficient and secure web-based monitoring service."

-- Steve Cotton, President, Data Power Monitoring Corporation

Project: The Battery Automated Reporting System

The Old Business Process: Data Power Monitoring Corporation provides a power system monitoring service to hundreds of clients across the globe.

Their old business process included delivering reports to clients on a weekly and monthly basis, where they hand-typed these reports into Excel formats and emailed them. On a monthly basis, the staff was expending three weeks of effort simply generating these reports.

The system they used to monitor the client sites was a PC running Windows that would use an analog modem and dial into each site to gather data.

The Solutions: The first goal was to move away from a time-intensive manually process of delivering information to an automatic system that the clients could interact with themselves to get the information they need.

We built a Linux-based Web Service (the B.A.R. -- Battery Automated Reporting system) that has a client log in section easily accessible with a web browser, uses SSL for security, and is hosted at our server facility in San Jose.

The Data Power team can easily manage user and company accounts from the Web, as well as manage the systems they monitor around the world. Each user is presented with an automatically scaled map of their systems in the world based on their user permissions, and they have instant access to all their system statuses, reports, and historical information including numerous graphical reports.

The system has a redundant backup and has a MySQL database tracking over 20 million points of data. It has a modular structure, allowing additions of new monitoring protocols, easy customization to foreign languages, and the ability to build automatic reporting functions in a variety of ways.

The Results: The new system has an updated process that collects and formats client data, so now, instead of 3 weeks of effort every month, the time has been cut to a few hours. It is scalable, so Data Power Monitoring could easily handle the load as their client needs doubled, and migrating from a Windows platform to a Linux platform increased the reliability tremendously.

With our ongoing support contract, the system continues to improve and now offers versions in two foreign languages! As Data Power Monitoring's needs grow, Douglas & Company is here to meet them.