Many states and cities across the US are promoting or succumbing to additional customer-sited Distributed Energy Resources (“DER”) such as solar and storage. As the number of grid interconnections increase, the following challenges (and effects) are arising: 1. Managing the manual approval process – straining the utility’s ability to meet service levels 2. Lack of consolidated data from installed DER’s – limiting the utility’s ability to plan its system, respond to outages, or account for resources in planning, operations and system load forecasting 3. Limited collaboration and communication tools between cities and utilities as they inspect systems – resulting in inefficiencies and redundancies 4. Difficult to forecast distributed generation – impacting system load requirements As a refresher, Connect-the-Grid™ provides utilities, municipalities, and cooperatives the ability to: 1. Ease the application submission process through use of electronic forms by customers and contractors 2. Leverage workflow management features to better allocate staff resources 3. Utilize the master data set for DER asset tracking and reporting/dashboards 4. Deliver automatic notifications to utility staff when applications approach approval time requirements 5. Perform real-time distributed generation forecasting and more! Contractors and electricity customers also benefit from the use of Connect-the-Grid™ through an improved customer experience.