Automated LDC Connectivity Exists!
If automating an otherwise cumbersome process is important to you, read on…
Throughout my conversations with Natural Gas Utilities, Marketers and Retailers, I consistently hear about a few areas of concern, so today I thought I would highlight a common area of struggle for these entities, LDC connectivity and EDI.
North America is made up of a great many Natural Gas LDCs, Utilities and Municipalities, with about 70% of them handling their transactions through a manual non-EDI process. Even the remaining 30% implement a somewhat loose definition of the technical “EDI” term. No matter if you are the organization transacting with the LDCs and Utilities or you are the LDCs and Utilities trying to manage your data and all the entities you have to send transactions to, the whole process at one point, and often many points, is manual for all parties involved. While the Power industry has seen large upgrades and many improvements over the years including almost everyone using full EDI functionality, the Natural Gas industry has moved at a slower pace when it comes to upgrades in software and how market participants interact. I’m sure we would all agree that the way we deal with Natural Gas LDC connectivity is a totally different animal than Power market transactions.
Regardless of how you manage your Natural Gas business, there is a common thread that can affect every aspect of your business: LDC data, its accuracy and processing time. For the most part, organizations have teams of people that manually pull down and upload data from the LDCs, a time-consuming and resource-wasteful approach, which results in under-realized margins, imbalance penalties, missed storage requirements, pool management issues, etc. Timing can also cause issues because people must manually work the process, or it won’t get done and the method varies with each LDC you are dealing with.
The good news is that there is a solution that is designed with the awareness of the disparate variations of data (or lack of) coming from LDCs and automates to the point where LDC connectivity requires minimal to no human intervention. With automation comes consistent timing of your transaction data, which enables you to manage your business more efficiently, uncover issues sooner and enable proactive responses instead of just reacting. Automation also frees up your staff to focus on the business and manage the many moving pieces of the Natural Gas business, such as pool management, storage requirements, critical days, avoiding imbalance penalties and, again, enabling them to be proactive.
Data accuracy is the backbone of any business and, in the Natural Gas world, a good chunk of that data comes from the LDC transactions. The normal manual processes provide so much risk for data corruption from files coming through incorrectly, being incomplete, to not being uploaded into the system properly, that many things can go wrong. Finding these issues and auditing the LDC data is just another manual process preoccupying your staff. When you can build out each unique LDC file template in one solution, it not only allows the automation of the transactional process, but also allows for automated auditing. Your team will be able to catch missing reads, reads that are way out of line historically and much more via a standard automated report. At the end of the day, there is a better way to handle Natural Gas LDC Connectivity and EDI, and that better way can make a profound and positive impact on your business.
So, whether it’s LDC connectivity or another area of struggle, when you decide to eliminate the barriers to your book growth and profitability, engage us and we’ll show you how you can gain competitive advantage that will drive book growth and reduction in per capita cost to serve.
– Ken
