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A leader in sustainable infrastructure, ENFRA is using OptigoVN to quickly generate very accurate scopes of work for vendors and clear major “landmines” in OT networks—saving “hundreds and hundreds of hours” across their portfolio.
At a Glance
- The Client: ENFRA, a leader in Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) with over a century of experience.
- The Scale: Long-term partnerships (20–30 years) managing complex facility upgrades and continuous asset performance.
- The Complexity: Integrating modern software—including Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD), renewables, and battery storage—onto aging legacy OT networks.
Modern building automation is a key factor in achieving energy efficiency and sustainability. ENFRA is a leader in the space, with roots dating back over a century, specializing in an Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS) model. This means they don’t upgrade a facility and move on to the next project. They enter into 20- to 30-year agreements with clients, often placing asset managers on-site to ensure optimal, continuous performance.
To deliver on these long-term promises, ENFRA integrates advanced solutions like Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD), Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS), and renewables. But, as Justin Carter, Controls Technologist at ENFRA, explains, layering modern software onto aging Operational Technology (OT) networks presents a massive risk.
Watch our chat with Justin below:
The Challenge: Stepping on Network Landmines
Before a facility can leverage advanced analytics or fault detection, the underlying network must be healthy enough to support the increased data traffic. For ENFRA’s Data Delivery team, deploying their proprietary software (ENFRA Connect) on top of a BACnet system with poor health was like stepping on a landmine. It could slow down or completely break the existing BAS functionality.
Without a clear picture of network health, new integrations often triggered broadcast storms or overloaded legacy controllers, leading to project delays and strained relationships with clients and existing BAS vendors.
Carter summarized the danger of ignoring the network baseline:
“Imagine you buy a plot of land, and you see there’s a slab there, and you’re like, I’m going to go ahead and build a house on that. Well, that’s the equivalency of the fault detection platform, where it’s like, well, let’s actually see what shape that’s in. You know, it’s in this kind of delicate state where as soon as you put this on top of it, cracks and crevices and the corner of the slab is going to erode and break off within a year?”
Before onboarding with Optigo Networks, diagnosing these delicate systems was a grueling process. “Before the product, we’re manually logging into front ends of systems, clicking around, writing down what we see. And to run your own Wireshark capture or something? And then also, and try to get through all that? It would take us years.”
The Solution: Proactive Diagnostics and the Network Health Score
ENFRA needed a way to proactively map and diagnose existing OT networks before deployment. They turned to OptigoVN.
Instead of flying blind, ENFRA now runs capture files through OptigoVN’s cloud-based platform. In minutes, the software runs dozens of checks and generates a comprehensive Health Score. The details pinpoint duplicates, misconfigurations, and programming errors.
“That’s the beauty of using Optigo Visual Networks, we get that score. It’s something that everyone understands. And we do that as a baseline before we even touch the automation system. And it’s also usually before we’re doing the BAS upgrades now, even to say that energy-as-a-service job? We could be upgrading 70% of the automation system, even before we put fault detection on it.”
This score has become a universal language across ENFRA’s internal teams and external vendor partners at every stage:
- Pre-Deployment Planning: The Data Delivery team uncovers existing issues to address before installing ENFRA Connect, preventing false blame for pre-existing network instabilities.
- Construction & Upgrades: Commissioning agents use it to find and fix duplicate device IDs and routing issues during the construction process.
- Long-Term Accountability: On-site asset managers track the score continuously. If a multi-vendor upgrade causes network lag, they don’t have to be BACnet experts to spot the issue; they simply look at the OptigoVN score and ask vendors, “Hey, the score went down 10 points. Can you log in and see if that was your project…?”
“Before [OptigoVN], we’re manually logging into front ends of systems, clicking around, writing down what we see. And to run your own Wireshark capture or something? And then also, and try to get through all that? It would take us years.”
Justin Carter, Controls Technologist II, ENFRA
The Results: Faster Deployments and Measurable Uptime
By using OptigoVN to spot and clear “landmines,” ENFRA has dramatically scaled up their ability to install Fault Detection faster and safer. The platform empowers them to quickly generate very accurate scopes of work for vendors to clean up issues—saving them “hundreds and hundreds of hours” across their portfolio.
In one recent example at a large university utility plant, an ENFRA technologist used a JACE wiretap to analyze a struggling network. OptigoVN identified the main culprit: graphics attempting to read objects were no longer there. By cleaning up these programming errors, they increased the network’s health score from a failing 40 to an 82, restoring system stability.
For ENFRA, OptigoVN isn’t just a troubleshooting tool—it is the foundation that allows their modern Energy-as-a-Service solutions to thrive safely and reliably on complex, multi-vendor campuses.
