Four countries, one set of numbers

Novar builds green energy systems for businesses across Europe: solar parks, battery storage, and the smart management that ties it all together. With employees in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Sweden, they needed software that could keep pace with their growth.

They arrived through a referral in 2020 and stayed six years.

Where it started

When they first reached out, they were managing their projects through a combination of Excel and Power Apps. It worked, but it was restrictive. As they grew, the manual overhead was becoming a bottleneck. Creating and documenting new projects took days, and there was no unified view of operations across countries.

They needed a system that could scale with them.

Three systems, built one at a time

Three interconnected systems ended up carrying Novar's operations, and they were built one at a time rather than planned as a suite.

Project Management Platform. The core of everything. A web application where Novar managed their entire portfolio: solar parks, rooftop installations, and battery storage projects. Hundreds of projects across multiple countries, all in one dashboard.

About eight end users across departments shaped this one with us. Each team had specific needs, and the challenge was building features that worked for everyone without creating a tangled mess. Custom permissions, cross-department workflows, integrations with SharePoint for document management.

Setting up and documenting a new project went from days to minutes.

Live Energy Dashboard. A simpler project, built alongside the main platform. A web interface that displayed real-time energy capture across their solar installations. They had no visibility into that before it existed.

Measurement Management Platform. This one came later, solving a different problem. Because of how their business operates, their measurement data captured by their parks had to be accurate and auditable by third parties.

Before, someone had to manually log into each supplier's portal, export data sets, and compile them into Excel for calculations. It took days.

The platform pulled measurements from multiple sources into a central database, connected to their data warehouse, with a web interface for downloading and reviewing data. The architecture was deliberately modular. If one supplier's API went down, everything else kept running.

FIG 1

What took days took less than five minutes. It stored thousands of data points a day, and the data was clean enough to pass third-party audits without headaches.

The week they changed their name

Solarfields became Novar partway through. The old name had stopped describing the company: they had grown past solar parks into battery storage and the management layer that ties it together, and the business had got bigger than the word for it.

A rename for them, a migration for the three platforms underneath. New domains. Every user's access to all three had to survive the move, and the SharePoint integration had to still resolve on the other side. Backups first, in case it did not.

The decision inside it was which addresses to carry across. The safe-looking answer is all of them: move everything, break nothing, find out later. That is not what happened. Accounts belonging to people who had already left were deliberately not migrated, because a rename is the one moment when somebody is actually looking at that list. Moving them would have meant carrying dormant accounts with live permissions into the new domain for as long as the platforms ran.

It took a little over a week, and nothing went down while it happened.

The bigger picture

The real outcome wasn't any single feature. It was what Novar could do that they couldn't before.

They had a unified view of operations across four countries. The silos were gone. Reporting that used to take weeks took hours. Underneath all of it, monitoring recorded a run of more than four years without an outage. And because the administrative burden dropped so dramatically, they could take on more projects and enter new markets faster.