The ONLY ETRM designed specifically for Natural Gas
Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) solutions are near and dear to my heart, having devoted so much of my career to ETRM software and its customization to meet company-specific needs. Unfortunately, customizations are the norm, representing high cost and high risk to unsuspecting buyers whose businesses require functionality beyond what traditional ETRM software provides. It wasn’t until I exited a global ETRM organization that I came to realize just how universal the term ETRM is in the industry and how convinced companies can become that an ETRM system will accommodate all their requirements. In fact, traditional ETRM products lack many essential commodity-specific operational capabilities.
ETRM vendors specialize in developing and selling trading software in support of a wide variety of wholesale commodities: power, natural gas, crude oil, refined products, corn, wheat, metals, and many others. Serving the needs of such a range of commodities means ETRM software functionality is designed for general breadth. While an ETRM’s breadth is capable of meeting certain business needs, its limitations fail to serve the needs of natural gas businesses that require depth in both retail and wholesale functionality.
Natural Gas businesses who select nGenue instead of a traditional multi-commodity ETRM product, do so for one or more of the following reasons:
- Functionality: Traditional multi-commodity ETRM products require customization to support the complex operational wholesale natural gas functionality (no such thing as out of the box functionality) and none offer retail functionality.
- Cost: Traditional multi-commodity ETRM products are expensive to license, expensive to implement and even more expensive to operate, requiring highly skilled (expensive) resources. Ask any company using a traditional multi-commodity ETRM product and they will tell you they have spent millions to stand it up, operate and support it.
- Enhancements: Functionality enhancements are always necessary and never free, but rather come at a substantial cost. Traditional ETRM vendors and their consulting partners thrive on revenue from a multitude of customizations (for what should be standard functionality) and the never-ending cost to support them.
How then do natural gas companies address the depth of natural gas-specific operational requirements, such as seamless integration of sales, complex pricing, nominations, forecasting, billing, invoicing, collections, taxes, accounting, and LDC/Marketer communications? While too many have followed the path of traditional multi-commodity ETRM software acquisition and customization, I can state with experience-based certainty that this approach is not a winning proposition. Ultimately, it is a costly and risky one. Here are a couple of ETRM vendor quotes that stand out in my memory: The first comes from a global ETRM vendor’s consulting head, who said, “There aren’t enough enhancements that can be made to our solution to meet the needs of natural gas business operations.” The second comes from another global ETRM vendor’s product development head, who stated, “We would have to rewrite 13 million lines of code to support natural gas specific business requirements, and that just won’t happen.”
The good news is that someone has already written all that code, albeit far less than 13 million lines! nGenue is an off-the-shelf, fully integrated wholesale and retail software solution for natural gas operations that costs a fraction of traditional multi-commodity ETRM software and eliminates the time, cost, and risk of traditional ETRM software customizations. nGenue functionality spans all day-to-day business operations from the pipeline to the city gate to the meter. It houses all wholesale and retail operations data in one central repository, simultaneously accessible for all business users via a standard user interface and has been in production for 25+ years.
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 do not. Engage us and we will 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
