The Challenge
A leading North American energy company needed a responsive savings calculator to help commercial, institutional, and industrial customers understand the potential value of participating in demand response programs.
The calculator needed to match users with available programs based on their ZIP or postal code, account for their industry and estimated curtailable energy load, and present projected earnings in dollars per kilowatt-year.
The customer-facing experience was important, but the larger technical challenge existed behind the form.
The underlying dataset included roughly 400,000 ZIP and postal code records. Each location mapped to one or more demand response programs, along with program details and estimated financial returns.
The existing Adobe Experience Manager implementation stored this data across hundreds of thousands of Content Fragments. Although the update process was expected to take several hours, it was difficult to complete reliably. The size and structure of the dataset made routine updates slow, complex, and difficult to validate.
Designing a Better Customer Experience
We redesigned the calculator as a responsive, multi-step form that guides users through the process without exposing the complexity of the underlying data.
Users enter their ZIP or postal code to identify the demand response programs available in their area. They can then select their industry, which provides an estimated curtailable kilowatt value based on typical usage, or enter their own estimate.
The interface uses immediate validation and clear feedback to help users identify and correct errors as they move through the form. The responsive layout and custom input controls make a data-heavy process feel direct and manageable across desktop and mobile devices.
Reworking the Data Architecture
Rather than continuing to manage approximately 400,000 individual Content Fragments, we consolidated the location data into roughly 130 JSON shards.
Each shard is organized by the opening characters of a ZIP or postal code. When a user enters a location, the calculator loads only the relevant shard instead of querying or downloading the entire dataset.
This reduced the amount of data required for each lookup while keeping the information organized in a format that could be stored and distributed through the AEM Digital Asset Manager.
The new architecture also reduced the deployment package from several gigabytes to roughly 1.5 MB.
Improving the Update Process
We created a data-management script that processes the source data, validates its structure, generates the JSON shards, and exports them directly into an AEM CRX package.
The team can now prepare and deploy updated program data without manually creating or modifying hundreds of thousands of Content Fragments.
This made the update process smaller, more repeatable, and easier to test. It also separated the data pipeline from the customer-facing application, allowing the calculator interface and demand response data to evolve independently.
Supporting a Large Demand Response Network
The calculator supports a large network of regional demand response programs across the United States and Canada.
The company manages several gigawatts of flexible demand capacity across thousands of active customer sites. Its programs generate tens of millions of dollars in annual payouts for participating commercial, institutional, and industrial customers.
At that scale, the calculator is more than a lead-generation form. It provides an entry point into a complex network of regional programs while giving the internal team a practical way to maintain the data behind it.
The Result
The project delivered a responsive customer experience and a significantly leaner data architecture.
By replacing hundreds of thousands of Content Fragments with targeted JSON shards and an automated packaging workflow, we reduced the deployment footprint, improved lookup performance, and gave the internal team a more dependable way to update program information.
The result is a calculator that is easier for customers to use and easier for the organization to operate.