Natural Gas Scheduling at its Best
Natural Gas Schedulers find themselves in the “eye of the storm,” responsible for getting many things right every day, with substantial dollars at stake, preserving tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue and preventing costly pipeline penalties. Conversations we’ve had with Schedulers tell the tale of long hours, stress and wondering whether management understands how difficult the job is, especially with the primary tool being spreadsheets, inept software or, worse, a combination of the two.
On any given day, a Natural Gas Scheduler must manage a multitude of tasks and demands from both internal and external parties, with complexity scaling with the size of the business. Schedulers from different companies have shared some common themes:
- The most common tool in the hands of the Scheduler is a spreadsheet; manually intensive, always growing in size and complexity, to the point of being unmanageable, not to mention a risk to the business in the event of attrition.
- Common alternatives to spreadsheets are either an ETRM system or homegrown scheduling software, either or both lacking core functionality for handling key scheduling elements such as model types, capturing nominations and ranking details, correctly calculating MDQs, maintaining pipeline rate schedules and fuel percentages, accurately calculating a WACOG for inventory valuation, modeling storage and handling ratchets – rarely is this managed by the software.
- Whether using spreadsheets or software, companies with both wholesale and retail operations struggle with ensuring positions align with volume commitments across their wholesale and retail operations.
Under these circumstances, Natural Gas Scheduler frustration and burnout is understandable, but it doesn’t have to be this way! nGenue was designed for the needs of the Natural Gas Scheduler and those of a Natural Gas business at large … all position and volumetric data is housed in a central database, where data is fingertip accessible in real-time to support daily scheduling tasks and management decision-making. nGenue task automation eliminates the need to manually manage rates, fees, fuel, MDQs, imbalance, and cashouts. These are automatically calculated by the nGenue system, enabling Schedulers to focus on business-critical tasks rather than spreadsheet or configuration maintenance. With all the data in one place and current up to the minute, ‘what if’ analyses can be performed and buy and sell decisions can be made confidently based on the information immediately available – when the market opportunity is good, you can see it instantly and make a Buy decision. Best of all, Retail and Wholesale positions are always aligned, significantly reducing the otherwise constant communication required between Retail and Wholesale staff to keep these teams coordinated.
LDCs, Marketers, Pipelines, Producers, 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.
nGenue enables Natural Gas Operational Excellence!
~Ken
