Another Natural Gas ETRM Go Live with nGenue
Our latest Go Live is for a large residential and C&I focused Natural Gas Marketer who made the strategic decision to acquire another book and merge the two businesses into one. It is easy to write, but for those who have the experience, you know it is another matter altogether when it comes to merging two books using disparate systems and business processes. Unless of course, a business does so with nGenue as its systems consolidation strategy.
Originally, the business leveraged an external service provider for its residential natural gas scheduling requirements. This was a valid option since the residential book volumes were modest. The Marketer then acquired a sizable book of large commercial and industrial customers, inheriting a capable staff that managed both LDC and pipeline scheduling inhouse. The obvious decision was to eliminate the third-party service provider and leverage the scheduling capabilities of the new business; that is, until the almost fifty spreadsheets used to manage the business came into view.
The spreadsheet-based approach was onerous, equating not only to a large amount of manual data entry and updating, but also an egregious amount of data reconciliation, which yielded neither business operations efficiency, nor would scale according to business growth plans. As well, scheduling data was managed by different people, each managing their own proprietary spreadsheet, resulting in a variety of issues that were identified as high risk. This inspired investigation of a new system for managing gas scheduling.
The Marketer is fortunate to have a highly experienced COO with decades of wholesale and retail systems software experience – the COO is not only attuned to detailed functionality requirements, but also experienced with the shortcomings of traditional multi-commodity ETRM and general-purpose software products. To this executive, nGenue’s Natural Gas specific design was both attractive and unique in the industry, sure to eliminate the issues associated with spreadsheet-based management.
nGenue implementation proceeded with the Marketer’s own resources taking lead on the implementation thanks to nGenue’s configuration, not coding, architecture. A phased approach according to market groupings was preferred, as was having its own resources clean up its data for importing into nGenue. LDC and pipeline connections were made, nGenue functionality was configured to the Marketer’s spec, clean data was populated into the nGenue repository, and the Marketer was up and running with nGenue, equipped to self-manage its new gas scheduling system. The outcome is a leadership team delighted to have full control over scheduling 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, “Before nGenue, our data was all over the place and it was as unclean as data could get. We could not accurately determine revenue or calculate projections. Our processes were painfully manual and inefficient. With nGenue, all our data is in one central location, organized with proper contract details, and fingertip accessible by all staff members. We are now efficient, and we have nGenue to thank for streamlining our scheduling process.”
Now that’s how to achieve Natural Gas Operational Excellence!
~Ken
