Accelerating Application Development with Claude at Maas Energy Works

When Maas Energy Works set out to replace hundreds of manual, spreadsheet-based reports with a single custom application, its development team needed a way to keep pace without losing consistency.

Within two sprints of introducing Claude Code and Claude Projects into its development process, Centric Consulting helped Maas Energy Works migrate its database, restructure its application, ship new features, and deploy to production, all while its own teams continued shaping the product through same-day feedback. At two weeks per sprint, that’s a month from start to finish.

The Challenge: Scaling Development Without Losing Consistency

As Maas Energy Works built the new application, a team of developers moved quickly to keep pace with the business’s needs. That speed introduced drift: Developers wrote pages, styled components, and handled errors in different ways, invisible to end users, but a growing risk heading into a larger migration.

At the same time, the application’s database sat on the same transactional data warehouse used by other business-critical processes. Running everything in one place started to cause conflicts that could affect day-to-day use.

Maas Energy Works needed to do the following:

• Establish one set of engineering standards across its development team
• Refactor the application for consistency without breaking existing functionality
• Separate its transactional and relational workloads onto a new, properly normalized database
• Continue shipping new features and releasing to production throughout rather than pausing for a single, large cutover

“We approached AI with a very practical mindset. How can it help our teams build better solutions faster while maintaining the quality standards our business depends on?” said Tom Huth, director of information technology at Maas Energy Works. “Working alongside Centric, we were able to integrate Claude into our development process in ways that directly supported application development, database design, and custom software development.”

The Solution: Combining AI and Engineering Expertise

An Anthropic registered partner, Centric Consulting worked with Maas Energy Works to build a new custom application that replaced hundreds of manual spreadsheets used across the business. The application supports renewable energy management, including RNG production, carbon credit generation, gas storage, and dispensing.

Once Maas Energy Works had adopted its own Claude Code licenses, Centric’s development team introduced Claude Code and Claude Projects, establishing a shared set of engineering standards and applying them consistently across the entire application.

Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all AI playbook like other firms, Centric’s team took a practical approach. They began by identifying where inconsistency and technical debt were putting Maas Energy Works’ migration at the most risk, then built engineering standards, refactoring, database, and UI work around those findings.

Centric’s solution centered on four key areas:

Standards and Governance: The team defined shared engineering standards in a single reference file and used Claude Code to apply them consistently across every page and component, closing the gap between each developer’s individual habits and one clear standard.

Refactoring at Scale: Every page was restructured to follow the same lifecycle, error-handling, and logging patterns with no loss of functionality. This eliminated the kind of inconsistency that would otherwise have required significant rework during migration.

Schema and Query Modernization: The team separated the application’s transactional and relational workloads and migrated them to a new, properly normalized database schema, improving how they worked alongside other business-critical systems, all while continuing to refactor the application in parallel. The team also standardized how the application wrote and organized its database queries, closing the same kind of inconsistency the other improvements addressed so query code followed one clear pattern.

UI Unification: The application’s interface was moved to a shared, token-based design system, replacing various visual approaches with one consistent user experience.

“What made this engagement stand out was Maas Energy Works’ willingness to move beyond AI experimentation and apply these capabilities to real business challenges,” said Mike Murphy, energy and utilities industry lead at Centric Consulting. “Our project team demonstrated how AI-assisted engineering can accelerate development, improve productivity, and help Maas Energy Works deliver technology solutions more effectively.”

Impact Beyond the Build

Development moved to an iterative model with same-day feedback, letting Maas Energy Works release new functionality to production incrementally rather than waiting for a single, large cutover. Enforcing a single set of standards across every page eliminated the inconsistencies that would’ve otherwise required rework later in the migration.

After adopting Claude Code and Claude Projects, sprint task velocity rose 50 percent as a result, from an average of 70 points per sprint to 105 over a 10-sprint stretch. 

Behind the scenes, the application also handles a substantial volume of data. Maas Energy Works captures minute-level readings from its utility meters, roughly 2 billion data points in total. The application aggregates that data into monthly results, often processing millions of records at a time.