What Centralized, Quality Data Will Do for Your Natural Gas Business
We recently found ourselves working with a Natural Gas business whose top priority was consolidating its customer data into a single, central data repository. This makes good sense for several reasons, however it’s not usually the first or even second priority communicated to us. Typically, businesses are seeking to increase operational productivity and efficiency, either to defray the cost of adding headcount and/or increase staff efficiency to handle more work volume. It’s usually not until after the business has adopted nGenue that it realizes how valuable it is to have all customer-related data in one place; where data can be shared, analyzed, updated and accessible across the organization. So, when this business stated its priority, we decided to explore its motivations to understand what makes it different from others.
We were told, first and foremost, “The business owners are committed to ensuring the operational staff has fingertip accessibility to complete and accurate data, as and when needed”. Historically, the business system of record comprised a couple software applications and dozens of spreadsheets, managed by several different staff members. Each new customer required spreadsheet updates and individual staff members had their own ways of capturing data such that inconsistencies existed from one spreadsheet to the next. This made data reconciliation an onerous undertaking that took staff away from higher value tasks such as supporting brokers’ efforts to acquire and onboard new customers. Nowhere in the business did a single, accurate representation of customer data exist, which was hugely frustrating to the leadership team and costly when decisions were made based on inaccurate “best estimates”.
Second was the business owner’s poor experience with employee turnover and the accompanying periods of turmoil that ensued when a staff member abruptly left the company. Departures not only left a void in day-to-day task management, but also took with them their knowledge of how their spreadsheets were structured and managed daily. In one case, an unexpected employee departure resulted in a >$50k imbalance penalty within the first 30 days, followed by another one a month later because remaining staff couldn’t figure out their former colleague’s “system” in time.
Lastly, this natural gas business must certify its financials and is routinely audited for WACOG. If you’ve never been through an audit, you haven’t had the misfortune of having an auditor give you that special look of disbelief when you turnover your dozens of spreadsheets and tell them everything they are looking for can be found within one or more of the spreadsheets. Auditors know better than anyone that spreadsheets are notoriously inconsistent and imprecise. All it takes is one bad audit experience to motivate a business to get its data together in a single data store, where business data is time and date-stamped, auditable, and traceable to the satisfaction of the most scrutinizing. And that’s what inspired this organization to call nGenue to establish a central repository of quality data for its Natural Gas operations.
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
