Solar engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contractors are increasingly turning to design and simulation platforms to cut proposal delays, improve design accuracy, and connect field assessments with simulation, financial modeling, and procurement workflows.

In an exclusive interview with Mercom India, Shashank Jha and Kalyan Tarafdar, co-founders at Reslink, which provides software and hardware to accelerate clean energy projects, discuss how solar EPC software and simulation platforms help EPCs use mobile-first 3D design, simulation, proposal, compliance, and procurement integration tools to improve project execution.

How is Reslink Energy helping solar EPC companies streamline project design, proposal generation, and customer management workflows in India?

Reslink connects the entire pre-execution workflow in one place. Site assessment, 3D design, shadow analysis, energy simulation, financial modeling, and proposal generation all occur within a single platform. What previously required multiple tools, multiple people, and two to four days can now be completed on a phone in under 20 minutes.

The biggest practical change is for field sales teams. A sales rep visiting a residential site in Pune or a factory rooftop in Surat can now generate a branded 3D proposal while standing in front of the customer, answer return on investment (ROI) and payback questions in real time, and close in the first meeting. EPCs using Reslink have reported up to 30% improvement in lead conversion within the first month, largely because the proposal reaches the customer while their intent is still active.

As India’s rooftop solar market scales, how are EPC workflows evolving?

Three things are happening at the same time. Project volumes are rising faster than EPC teams are growing, so every workflow inefficiency gets amplified. A company that could manually manage 10 projects a month starts to break down at 40. Second, customers are more informed than they were three years ago. They expect a visual proposal, a clear generation estimate, and clarity on ROI during the first meeting, not a Portable Document Format (PDF) three days later. Third, projects are getting more complex. Ground-mount, hybrid systems, battery energy storage system (BESS) integration, time-of-day (TOD) tariff modeling for commercial and industrial (C&I) customers, all of this means the design and proposal layer has to keep pace. The EPCs adapting fastest are the ones standardizing their workflows digitally so that no single team member becomes a bottleneck.

What are the most common operational bottlenecks EPC companies face today?

The biggest one is handoff loss. A sales rep visits the site, collects measurements and photographs, hands the information to a design engineer, who prepares a layout, passes it to someone for costing, and then to someone else for proposal formatting. Each handoff adds a day and introduces errors. For a 10 kW residential project, this is painful. For a pipeline of 30 projects running simultaneously, it becomes unmanageable.

The second major bottleneck is key person dependency. Bill of materials (BOM) calculations, structural sizing, and financial modeling often live in one person’s head. When that person leaves, which happens very frequently, given how actively solar talent gets poached in India right now, the workflow breaks down entirely. We have spoken to promoters of ₹500 million (~$5.2 million) turnover EPC companies who were personally doing BOM calculations at night because their trained person had left.

The third is procurement disconnection. Even after a proposal is approved, someone manually reconstructs the full material list for procurement, recounting components that the 3D design already knows precisely.

How important are simulation, design, and digital proposal tools becoming?

They are quickly becoming the baseline expectation rather than a competitive advantage. A customer who has seen a 3D visual of their own rooftop, with panels placed accurately, shadows mapped month by month, and a monthly generation figure explained to them, is fundamentally easier to close than one who received a text quotation two days after the site visit. In terms of accuracy, simulation tools reduce oversizing and undersizing errors that directly hurt system performance. An oversized system means the customer paid more than necessary. An undersized one means they are disappointed with their electricity savings. Both damage the EPC’s reputation. Digital simulation removes most of this guesswork.

How do local regulations, tariff structures, and net metering frameworks influence proposal workflows in India?

More than most people outside the industry realize as net metering rules vary significantly by state. Export limits, banking ratios, and distribution company (DISCOM) approval timelines all affect how a system should be sized and priced. A proposal that makes clear economic sense in Maharashtra may not work the same way in Rajasthan or Tamil Nadu without adjustments to the sizing logic and financial model.

TOD tariffs add another layer for C&I customers. A factory paying peak tariffs between 6 PM and 10 PM needs to understand exactly how much of that load their solar system will offset and when. The PM Surya Ghar subsidy eligibility, GST treatment of components, and DISCOM interconnection requirements all inform the proposal and influence customer decision-making. Any workflow platform serving Indian EPCs has to localize for all of this. A global tool ported to India without these adaptations creates more confusion than it solves.

Are solar EPC companies in India becoming more receptive to digital workflow platforms?

Clearly yes. Rooftop solar volumes under the PM Surya Ghar program and rising C&I adoption are creating project pipelines that manual workflows simply cannot support. Larger EPCs adopted design software earlier. Mobile-first platforms have significantly lowered the barrier. A field sales rep with no engineering background can now run a simulation and generate a proposal on their phone after a single demo session. Reslink onboarded over 4,500 EPC companies within four months of launch across India, the U.S., the United Kingdom, and parts of Asia Pacific.

How do digitization priorities differ between small and large EPC firms?

Larger EPCs prioritize integration. They want design tools that connect with their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, procurement platforms, and project management workflows. They have dedicated design engineers and finance teams, and can handle complex software with longer onboarding cycles. For them, the question is usually how to reduce coordination costs across large teams.

Smaller and mid-sized EPCs prioritize speed and simplicity. They need a single tool that covers the entire workflow without requiring a technical specialist to operate it. They also need it to work on mobile because their teams are almost entirely field-based. The commercial trigger is different, too. Larger EPCs digitize to manage complexity at scale. Smaller EPCs digitize to compete and survive as project volumes grow faster than they can afford to hire.

How significant is the opportunity for workflow digitization across India’s solar EPC ecosystem?

Very large and largely untapped, as all solar projects run through an EPC.

Despite this volume, the EPC workflow software layer remains significantly underpenetrated relative to the number of projects being executed. Most EPCs are still running proposals on Excel and WhatsApp. Conservatively, the addressable market for EPC workflow platforms in India is upwards of $50 million, and that number will grow as adoption accelerates in tier 2 and tier 3 markets.

Which parts of the solar EPC workflow remain the most under-digitized?

BOM generation and procurement are the most under-digitized parts of the entire workflow. After every approved proposal, most EPCs still manually reconstruct the full material list. Cables, multi-contact 4 (MC4) connectors, mounting hardware, clamps, lugs, glands, structural components, all of it is recalculated by hand, even though the 3D design already contains every piece of information needed to generate it automatically.

Structural BOM, in particular, has had almost no automation in the Indian market. Structure is typically the second- or third-largest cost in a solar project, often ranging from 8% to 15% of the total project cost, depending on roof type and system size. Errors in structural procurement are expensive and slow down installation. Yet most EPCs are still calculating it manually, project by project. Post-installation asset monitoring and operations and maintenance workflows are also significantly under-digitized, especially for EPCs managing portfolios of 50 or more installed systems.