Make 2023 a Banner Year for Your Natural Gas Business
With 2022 in our rearview mirror, the New Year affords us all a fresh start, including how we can take what we learned from this last year and build upon it. It’s a time for reflection and self-examination, of ourselves individually and our businesses. At nGenue, we ended another strong year thanks to natural gas businesses committed to changing their operations for the better. What about you … Are you feeling good about your staff productivity and related costs, your customer service, your growth trajectory, your bottom line? Or, are the challenges you faced in 2022 and before still a drag on your business performance?
If you’ve been reading my blogs over the last year, you have read about common root causes of natural gas operational challenges. While natural gas businesses differ in terms of markets, C&I, Choice and Residential customer proportions, most face common operational shortcomings impacting growth and achievement of financial objectives. Typically, it’s a result of one or more of four scenarios under which the business is operating:
a. Spreadsheets and manual processes
b. Multiple unconnected software applications
c. Failed ETRM system implementation
d. Enterprise software stack lacking natural gas-specific functionality
The prevailing circumstances in these environments are day-to-day operations that are manually intensive, requiring excessive data reconciliation, and equating to disproportionate operational cost. In fact, we have yet to encounter a Producer, Pipeline, Marketer, or Utility whose business is operating at its desired efficiency, whose per capita cost to serve is declining and whose customer service exceeds expectations. The business impact examples are telling. LDCs often struggle with data integrity due to outdated technologies and have trouble managing their Marketer business. Marketers struggle with costly spreadsheet dependency and capturing accurate margins due to data “all over the place” that doesn’t tie together properly. Utilities struggle with forecasting their total load requirements due to a lack of retail operations functionality.
Natural Gas Producers, Pipelines, Marketers, LDCs and Utilities … YOU CAN DO BETTER!
Consolidate your spreadsheets and disparate applications into nGenue; a purpose-built solution for Retail and Wholesale natural gas operations that stores ALL your customer and customer-related data in one place – yes, a mouse-click accessible, single version of the truth of your most important data! With functionality spanning all day-to-day business operations from wellhead to pipeline to city gate to meter, nGenue has been in production use for 20+ years, houses all operations data in one central repository, simultaneously accessible by all business users via a common user interface. Enjoy a single point of data entry that permeates the system – data reconciliation and related human error are eliminated, real-time business performance analysis and reporting are enabled, and your operations achieve peak performance. Here’s what one nGenue user has to say …
“The centralization and utilization of data, the speed and efficiency of the software, the expansiveness of capabilities from start to finish and the customizability of the system have all far exceeded expectations. We can truly run our natural gas supply operations inclusive within the nGenue system, which is nothing I’ve seen before. I was proud of the spreadsheet system I developed and utilized for almost 15 years. Having retired it for nGenue, I am ecstatic that our efficiency, data integrity, automation processes & operational capabilities have been greatly enhanced, giving us an edge in a highly competitive industry.”
End Users, Producers, LDCs, Marketers, Pipelines, and Utilities face increasing competitive and compliance pressures, requiring increased operational efficiency, data integrity and process improvement. Their operational systems must support this, but most don’t. Engage us and we’ll show you how to make a breakthrough. It’s what we do for natural gas companies, and we are experts in our field.
Happy New Year!
~Ken
