Video: Avoiding solar site photo errors with SiteCapture | The Pitch
Time is money, but so are the errors that result from working too fast. Kamal Shah, CEO of SiteCapture, went on The Pitch to explain how solar contractors can leverage technology to achieve efficient field operations without sacrificing quality.
Watch the full 14-min episode right here, download as a podcast (Apple podcast, Spotify, Podbean), or skim this partial transcript and skip to a section in the timestamps below.
- 0:25 – Overview of SiteCapture
- 1:20 – How solar companies use the SiteCapture platform
- 3:50 – How can solar operations be “inefficient” in the field?
- 4:57 – Improving site photo documentation and review
- 6:40 – Solving TPO finance process headaches
- 8:48 – Quantifying efficiency improvements
- 9:43 – Three other handy features of SiteCapture
- 12:10 – How is SiteCapture using Artificial Intelligence?
Inefficient solar field operations explained
Shah: “When I think about inefficient field operations, it’s about all that extra time that gets spent doing other things other than actually selling or getting the panels on the roof and getting it connected. The more of that other stuff you’re doing, that’s where it costs money, it costs time, and it’s really inefficient.
“One of the big things that solar installers need to do is gather photo documentation and all of the stuff they need during a site survey, or for a proposal or plan set, or a job close out to document the entire system, stuff that need to submit to financing … there’s just lots of extra work that’s required, and that can be very inefficient.”
The problem with solar site photos
Shah: “There’s obviously benefits of everybody having a camera, and a really good camera in their pocket on their phone, but it’s sort of a blessing and a curse. Someone could just go in and easily take 400 or 500 photos of all sorts of stuff and just submit it, and then somebody else has to rummage through them all and figure out whether all the right ones were taken.”
“In the solar industry, there is very specific requirements for this kind of photo documentation and at all the various steps along the project. For solar installers to be able to do this efficiently, they need make sure their crews know exactly which photos are required for every step of the process. So, what photos are required during a site survey to allow design verification, or to allow a proposal or plan set to be put together? Financing is another great example.
“Making sure that all the right photos are captured every time — that’s really where you need something more than just a camera, like SiteCapture.”
What is SiteCapture?
SiteCapture is a software company for managing field operations — meaning jobs being done out on job sites — for the construction, property management, and solar industry. It is used by thousands of companies on millions of jobs, and the solar industry is now its largest market.
“We have a lot of large well-known companies like Trinity Solar, Omnidian, Blue Raven, as well as lots and lots of medium and smaller regional installers,” Shah says.
How to use SiteCapture?
SiteCapture is an application that connects the office with installers in the field. Once a project is created, the job gets assigned to operations, and then tasks are listed and marked as completed within the app.
“We’ve got what we call Smart Forms or templates that really guide the crews out in the field on what they need to do, and what information they need to capture, and what photos they need to capture,” Shah says. “It shows them example photos to give them instructions and make sure that they can do all of that stuff the very first time.”
There is much more discussed in the episode, such as in-app messaging, integrations with TPO providers to streamline photo documentation and project approval, and how AI tools could change the photo review process even more. Hear Shah explain it all right here:
