nGenue Replaces Safari for Natural Gas Billing
It is always a pleasure to announce new nGenue adopters. In most cases, we make arrangements that permit us to name the company, even quote a company representative on what prompted their selection of nGenue. In this case, while we don’t have such details to offer, the exhaustive evaluation process (over a 19-month period) compels me to tell the story for those of you hanging onto spreadsheets or software that wasn’t designed for Natural Gas operations and whose continued use is costing you money.
This is the story of a large multi-commodity Marketer; one whose natural gas business is of substantial proportion, demanding natural gas-specific functionality. A longtime Safari user, nGenue engagement began with an inbound inquiry that led to receipt of the company’s RFI. Upon reviewing the RFI, we immediately identified a strong fit between nGenue capabilities and Marketer specifications for:
- Natural Gas-specific Accounting, Billing, and Utility EDI functionality
- Ability to integrate with existing enterprise applications
- Centralized operations data, simultaneously accessible by all staff
- User-friendly, modern, and consistent user interface
- Software flexibility, user-configurability, and self-administration
- Multi-window productivity and fast screen responsiveness
- Commitment to release software enhancements on a regular interval
- Accommodation of enhancement requests
These requirements are fairly consistent with a business seeking software for Natural Gas Billing. Yet, most software companies that claim to offer Natural Gas Billing functionality don’t actually deliver what a natural gas business would consider to be essential functionality, let alone all of the above. The reason is that their software is either commodity-generic or designed for Power and marketed as capable of serving the needs of Natural Gas. When early in the evaluation process, a company representative made the comment, “We’ve lived with our existing solution for so long that we’ve had to develop many spreadsheets and other workarounds in order to manage our business,” we realized the task before us was multi-faceted. Not only must we transfer knowledge and experience pertaining to nGenue capabilities, but also convince company users and executives to trust a software vendor once again to actually deliver what is communicated.
So, that was our focus over many months of remote and on-site meetings, reinforced by countless Email exchanges that transferred volumes of information and customer data in support of more than a dozen custom demonstrations of nGenue functionality; all to prove an nGenue experience would be superior to the existing. In the end, the choice of nGenue was reached with great enthusiasm and relief, and the migration got underway.
End Users, Producers, LDCs, Marketers, Pipelines, 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.
~Ken
