New Marketer Goes Live with nGenue
Remember my 2/17/21 blog, Natural Gas Marketer Trend to Boost Profitability? Our latest Go Live is for one of the marketers referenced; a multi-state, small/medium business and residential focused Natural Gas Marketer who made the strategic decision to transition its wholesale scheduling from an external service provider to in-house management, establishing new control over its business performance.
For the most part, the Marketer had built its business on the backs of spreadsheets. What it did not manage internally with spreadsheets, it outsourced to external service providers like a national three-letter gas company who managed its wholesale scheduling. Using an external service provider for wholesale scheduling presented several challenges that conflicted with business objectives. First, the marketer found itself completely at the mercy of the service provider who clearly had its own best interests in mind. Second, being that the Marketer was in competition with the service provider only squeezed margins further. Third, back and forth internal-external communications made for a cumbersome administration process, and fourth, using a wholesale scheduling service provider prevented the ability to leverage storage to the Marketer’s financial benefit.
The Marketer came to realize that bringing scheduling in-house was required to meet its business objectives. Doing so would increase its control and streamline operations that would favorably impact financial performance. At the same time, the Marketer’s own experience with manual and error-prone spreadsheet management convinced it that finding a software-based solution was the preferred [only] approach. Via word-of-mouth referral, nGenue came into view.
With its external scheduling service provider contract end date looming, the Marketer undertook a brisk yet thorough review of nGenue scheduling functionality to ensure its needs would be met. Following encouraging nGenue functionality demonstrations, the Marketer identified a sample set of its own data that was loaded into nGenue to pave the way for a 2-hour hands-on workshop, affording the lead scheduler the ability to test-drive the nGenue system to validate the efficiency advantage nGenue software represented over spreadsheets. This exercise validated the efficiency of the nGenue solution that would only require a single headcount to operate. At the same time, the Marketer gained visibility to how nGenue scheduling functionality is fully integrated with pricing, billing, customer care and ETRM capabilities; identified priorities to be addressed in future.
nGenue implementation proceeded without a hitch – start to finish, taking only 6 weeks. LDC and pipeline connections were made, nGenue functionality was configured to the Marketer’s spec, data was populated into the nGenue repository, the external service provider contract was terminated, and the Marketer was up and running with nGenue, equipped to self-manage its wholesale scheduling activities. The outcome was a Marketer delighted to have full control over its wholesale operations and impressed with the efficient process and data transparency the nGenue solution provides.
Many we speak with believe purpose-built software for Natural Gas operations either does not exist or, if it does, it will be cost prohibitive, but this marketer will attest that neither of these opinions are true. As this new nGenue user stated, “Lacking fingertip accessibility to our own data was weird and we didn’t have a good answer for ‘Why aren’t we doing this ourselves?’ While we were apprehensive with pulling in these operations, the nGenue solution and expertise made the process easy and empowered us to quickly get a handle on our new responsibilities. Thanks to nGenue, we are no longer at the mercy of an external provider who simply wanted to keep us on the hook and whose service was squeezing our margins. Using nGenue for scheduling, now have real-time visibility to what’s going on and have greater control over our financial performance.”
I could not have said it better myself!
– Ken
