The days when a single oil boiler supplied an entire household are over. PV systems, battery storage, heating rods, EV charging stations and heating now share one home, each following its own programming.
Challenge
KWB’s answer is Clee, a strong energy management system built on the company’s control engineering expertise. It coordinates every component to maximize self-consumption and minimize operating costs. The technology worked. The existing web interface, however, could not convey its value: customers found it hard to see what the system did for them, and without that visibility they saw little reason to pay for it.
KWB therefore decided to build an intuitive mobile app with live data and insights on top of Clee. New compliance requirements such as the Cyber Resilience Act also meant replacing legacy systems under time pressure. App development and UI/UX design lay outside KWB’s core competencies, so the company sought a partner large enough to cover a broad range of skills, including topics too small for a dedicated hire, without depending on single individuals.
Solution
Cloudflight developed the KWB App, the central interface through which customers control and visualize their energy system on mobile devices. The cross-platform application with an Azure Cloud backend is built on a target architecture and IoT connectivity that Cloudflight and KWB developed jointly.
Before that, the two companies got to know each other. In the first year, they completed one or two smaller projects unrelated to energy management, each opening with an architecture workshop and running for two to three months. Convinced by Cloudflight’s skills and way of working, KWB then commissioned the app.
Development was Cloudflight’s core contribution, complemented by architecture, requirements engineering, project management and selected UI/UX design that built on another agency’s concept. During the idea phase and requirements analysis, Cloudflight also critically questioned KWB’s goals, which the company considered important.
To make the app possible, the backend needed extensive changes: a demanding step with considerable technical risks that ultimately worked out really well. Since the MVP launch, a new release has followed every six weeks on average.
Benefits
Today, KWB sells part of its heating systems solely because of its energy management. The KWB App plays a major part in this, as it makes what Clee delivers tangible for customers. And it pays off for households: in day-to-day use, operating costs fall in some cases to two to three cents per kilowatt-hour, compared to well over ten cents for conventional oil heating.
Together with Cloudflight, the client kept the project within budget, and jointly agreed deadlines are met reliably. KWB still consults Cloudflight on architecture questions today.
Our engineers are very satisfied with the collaboration, including Cloudflight's expertise in technology selection and architecture. Everything worked well, always in close coordination with us.
David Oblak
