Natural Gas LDC / Marketer Transaction Automation
Natural Gas managers must have processes in place to ensure accurate and efficient operations. Communication of data between LDCs and Marketers, however, is a common challenge across markets, especially when each LDC has a unique method of communicating both customer and pool data, such as enrollments, cancellations, MDQs, cycle and daily meter reads. Absent of an efficient communication approach, natural gas businesses are exposed to time-consuming, error prone manual processes, increasing risk and impacting margin.
Natural gas companies expend significant effort managing communications between marketers and LDCs, managing an increasing amount of recurring data transmitted between parties. Information is typically gathered from several sources, such as custom applications and spreadsheets, and then converted into a standardized format. Next, this data must be validated and transmitted to the counterparty. With this information being bidirectional, counterparty uploads must be aggregated, contents deciphered, and the information then incorporated into existing processes. Such activity is monotonous, requiring ongoing manual effort that is prone to human error and consumes valuable time of operations staff. This is where automated LDC / Marketer transaction automation proves to be invaluable.
LDC / Marketer transaction automation is more than just EDI connectivity; it eliminates manual effort, providing natural gas managers with a single trusted solution for Marketer / LDC integration. And, unlike manual management of communications, applying automation to the disparate LDC processes minimizes the need for human intervention, reducing labor costs, eliminating human error, and shortening processing time, which leads to shorter cash flow cycles and increased customer satisfaction. Using LDC / Marketer Transaction Automation, natural gas businesses can:
- Automate the transfer of end user information including Enrollments, MDQs, Historical Usage, Nominations, Actuals, Billing details (Rate-ready/ Bill-ready), etc.
- Simplify any EDI connection via a configuration tool that supports any LDC and their unique EDI / non-EDI requirements.
- Administer exceptions through an integration dashboard with detailed management tools for auditing and analysis.
Data accuracy is the backbone of any business, and, in the Natural Gas world, a good chunk of that data comes from LDC transactions. Manually managed data transmission represents excessive risk for data corruption, from files coming through incorrectly or incompletely. Finding these issues and auditing the LDC data is just another manual process preoccupying operations staff. The superior approach is LDC / Marketer transaction automation that establishes a unique template for each LDC, enables the automation of the transactional process as well as its auditing. Operations staff are then equipped to catch missing reads, reads that are 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 will have a profound and positive impact on your business.
End Users, 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
