Pan-African solar home system manufacturer BBOXX has launched Pulse, a cloud-based task management platform that the companies believe will enable distributed businesses to improve efficiency and enhance customer service.

BBOXX develops solar home systems coupled with its SMART Solar platform, and has so far deployed 150,000 systems. Already operating in the likes of Rwanda, Kenya, Cameroon, Nigeria and Togo, BBOXX recently announced it was expanding into the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

It said distributed energy businesses in developing countries face a common challenge of managing scale as customers, products and employees are dispersed across a range of remote locations.

In order to prioritise resources and scale effectively, companies must have clear understanding of how customers, products and agents are performing. The launch of the Pulse platform is designed to help them overcome these challenges, supporting a wide-range of products and businesses, spanning solar home systems, large solar, and metering applications such as pumps and mini-grids.

Pulse gamifies and digitalises a business' entire sales and service management, automating tasks for sales agents, technicians, call centres and its supply chain. Through its cloud-based infrastructure, Pulse uses big data to offer a business an accurate picture of performance quickly, and uses machine learning to enable predictive analytics.

For example, Pulse uses product monitoring to predict failure and allow the operational team to proactively support customers, automatically schedules field staff tasks, and understands what type of customer is most likely to default. It gives management the ability to make data-driven decisions on how best to maximise available resources.

The platform is already in use within BBOXX itself. In 2017, it automated 14,000 actions daily for the BBOXX staff in Kenya and Rwanda, managing sales leads, supply chain deliveries, call centre and repair actions. It processed over one million payments in 2017, and enabled management of US$50 million in customer contract value.

"Pulse is the heartbeat of distributed businesses and combines our years of market expertise into a single platform," said Mansoor Hamayun, CEO of BBOXX.

"The rapid growth of our business highlighted the need for efficient task management. Distributed businesses often struggle with monitoring customers' products and needs, along with the activity of its workforce. This hampers efficiency and forms a barrier to business expansion. We need to manage products within a distribution mix; Pulse supports a range of energy products and is already being used by BBOXX partners in Nigeria and Pakistan. We have always maintained a strong technology focus and will continue to invest significantly in our dedicated engineering team in order to realise the true potential of big data across all of BBOXX's distributed energy businesses."