When you see an establishment proudly displaying a green building certification plaque in the window, you know it's benefitting not only the occupants inside but also the environment and surrounding community. But how are these esteemed achievements awarded, and who’s behind the awarding process?
In short, it takes some meticulous planning, a few different teams, and a whole lot of thorough documentation to accomplish green certification. That’s where we come in. To ensure a more successful process and easier user experience, our team worked to digitize a massive library of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) forms. We rebuilt the process and moved from outdated file types to online forms that are usable and accessible to all.
The Background: What is the LEED Online Program?
If you’re familiar with green building certification, you’ve most likely heard of LEED. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainability in the building and construction industry, developed the LEED program in 1994. And as of 2023, there are over 105,000 LEED certified buildings and over 205,000 LEED accredited professionals in 185 countries worldwide.
Achieving LEED certification demonstrates a commitment to environmental stewardship, resource efficiency, and occupant health and well-being. Commercial buildings, residential dwellings, neighborhoods, and communities are all eligible to pursue and achieve LEED certification and join the growing network of healthier, greener establishments worldwide.
The Vision: Enter our IT Specialists
From a technical standpoint, LEED certification involves rigorous documentation, analysis, and verification processes to ensure compliance with the program's requirements. These documents may include forms for energy modeling, water usage calculations, indoor air quality testing, and documentation of sustainable materials and construction practices, among a multitude of green design metrics.
In 2019, our team was called on to help create all new HTML forms for the next version of the LEED Rating System (v4.1), transfer existing PDF documents to the new HTML format, and upgrade the database and data storage systems to accommodate the new web-based format.
After nine months of careful planning and data mapping, our team created a phased data migration strategy and rollout plan for converting existing Adobe PDFs to HTML forms and building the new v4.1 documents.
The Plan: Combining Strategy and Production
Converting PDFs into an HTML format isn’t light work, especially considering the volume of documents included under the umbrella of LEED certification. Even though we planned to execute a phased migration and rollout to help manage time and resources, our team was responsible for over 5,000 forms during this upgrading process to the new system. You can view a detailed list of the LEED forms and their release dates here on the USGBC website.
Before diving deeper into the implementation and impact of the file and data migration, here’s a quick overview of the strengths and challenges of PDF and HTML forms.
The challenges of PDF forms
- Gaining access to Adobe PDF is costly
- Adobe PDF files aren’t scalable and can’t be updated easily
- Adobe PDF technology doesn’t let you upload multiple files at once (applying for LEED Certification can require uploading around 130 documents)
- Storing, saving, and rendering files is slow with documents stored in a DMS SAP
- Analyzing data for each form isn’t intuitive or efficient
- The UX isn’t ideal for back- and frontend users
- Security is compromised without Adobe Flash Reader (which is a major concern for projects that could be sharing sensitive data and information)
The strengths of HTML forms
- HTML forms are more cost-effective without Adobe licensing fees
- Updating HTML forms is fast and simple
- Users can upload multiple files at once (up to 50 documents)
- Files load and save faster
- Data visualizations are easier to obtain and more interactive
- The UX is more intuitive for all users
- HTML forms can run in any browser on any device
- Auto-drafting features can instantly validate data and prevent data
- All data is secure on the server which also prevents spam submissions
Some of the most significant challenges our team had to overcome during the development process were understanding and mapping each version of the form as well as identifying the unique elements present across forms. This required our team to develop a deep understanding of the form structures and follow a meticulous approach to creating the new documents to ensure accuracy.
The Outcome: Implementation and Impact
Our team developed a unique HTML form system to give new life to the LEED Online certification program. Overall, our goals included enhancing UX, ensuring data security, enhancing data storage and visualization, decreasing load times, improving the file uploading process, eliminating cost-related barriers, and offering an all-around more intuitive and efficient experience on USGBC’s platform.
In addition to creating a unique system for converting existing files and creating new forms, our developers engineered a seamless transition between the LEED scorecard and accompanying forms, eliminating the need to download a program like Adobe to complete the PDF Form.
Once the first batch of new forms was created and released to the public, we received an overwhelmingly positive response from USGBC’s clients using the system. This customer feedback was invaluable to us as we continued to deliver batch updates on time with our monthly rollout strategy.
Now, project leaders pursuing LEED certification can more effectively track, manage, and celebrate their progress toward improving their environmental impact with USBGC’s new and improved platform.
Overcoming Challenges
Accomplishing major milestones inevitably comes with a fair share of difficult challenges. While we successfully revitalized the LEED certification process, we also faced a unique set of challenges that were necessary to address over the course of our document transformation journey.
Let’s discuss a few collective highs and moments for growth during our process:
- Key Milestone: We reached a significant milestone when we figured out our best approach to mapping the different form versions.
- Data Transformation Challenge: Converting data from Adobe PDF from an SAP (stored in XML format) to JSON was a complex task for our team.
- Data Rendering and Corruption Challenges: Our team encountered issues with data rendering, checkout issues, and data corruption.
How did we, as a team, overcome these challenges? Our experts adopted a systematic approach to address the problem areas, breaking down each challenge into manageable, individual tasks until the problem as a whole was resolved. Developers leveraged their technical expertise to drive innovative solutions and maintained open and effective communication to ensure everyone was aligned on our team’s objectives and solutions.
From the beginning of 2019 to January 2023, our team completely overhauled the LEED Online form submission process, drastically improved data analysis, and directly impacted the customer experience and satisfaction, resulting in a more holistic, intuitive system for all of USGBC’s users.
The Tools We Used
We wouldn’t be able to accomplish our goals without the help of the perfect combination of tools.
The main technologies we used included:
- VueJS JavaScript Framework
- ChromeV8 Engine
- PHP7.2
- NodeJS Server Side
- MongoDB - NoSQL database program
