Operational Inefficiency Hindering Your Natural Gas Business?
Myself and my team regularly meet with Natural Gas business leaders. Recently, during a consultation with a large Natural Gas company, its COO revealed her business operations as being “too labor-intensive, too expensive and constraining growth.” The customer base consists of C&I and Mass Markets customers with an operational environment comprised of more than three dozen staff, spanning Sales Operations, Customer Care, Accounting, Billing, Trading, Forecasting, and Supply Management. The COO described the tools used by her staff as a combination of spreadsheets, homegrown and off-the-shelf, single-function software applications. Portions of Customer and customer-related data are separately housed within each of the applications and spreadsheets. There is no central repository of data – no ‘single version of the truth’ so to speak, and staff spend a significant amount of time working to reconcile the data across disparate databases. “It’s frustrating and time-consuming for our staff, costly to the business, impacting customer experience and our ability to grow our book”, the COO said.
It was a distressing account, yet across my own and my team members’ numerous engagements, we hear similar stories time and time again. The business starts with spreadsheets, over time adds some 3rd party applications and perhaps develops some software functionality in-house to plug holes. That’s what this COO has on her hands, dozens of spreadsheets, along with two 3rd party and four homegrown applications. The COO summarized, “We have this operational mess that has hobbled our productivity and obstructed our growth.”
Delving deeper, I learned data reconciliation weighs so heavily on day-to day operations that the lack of quick access to trusted data has been identified as the leading impediment to making confident decisions based on accurate information. “Having all the data in one place and tied together is our priority, as is consolidating all the software applications and spreadsheets”, the objectives being to:
- Speed decision-making and make better decisions
- Eliminate time and cost of maintaining alignment across several software applications
- Establish a central repository of quickly accessible data, eliminating data reconciliation activity
The desired outcome is higher productivity and efficiency at a lower operational cost and reduced risk. Sound like pipe dream? Not so and soon to be not so for this COO and her business, as she learned purpose built for Natural Gas operations software exists that enables Natural Gas businesses to productively and more profitably manage both retail and wholesale operations with capabilities spanning Pricing/Quoting/Contracting, Billing, Customer Management, LDC/Marketer EDI Transaction Automation, Scheduling, and Trading & Risk. All data is housed in a central database, simultaneously accessible by all business users, a mere mouse click away.
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
