Essent Energie: Gas Nominatie Systeem

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CIBER & Essent Energie successfully implement tailor-made Gas Nomination System

Introduction

As per January 1st, 2003 Essent Energie is successfully using their new Gas Nomination System (GNS). This tailor-made solution has been delivered within a very ambitious time box of 9 months. GNS is the product of a very successful co-operation between the CIBER Nederland Custom Solutions group and the following Essent Energie departments: Gas Operations, Transport Management, Trade and Back Office.

Customer Background

Essent Energie is a large market player in the Dutch utilities line of business (i.e. water, coal, gas and electricity). As the liberalization of the Dutch utilities market is progressing, the systems supporting the various business processes have to evolve as well. Essents customers are power plants, factories and other large to medium sized businesses. To supply these customers daily on the most effective an efficient way, customer demand and/or demand forecasts are made on a daily and day-ahead basis with an hourly granularity to determine the amount of natural gas to be supplied. Based on this load forecast and historic data the Essent Energie Trade department concludes long and short-term supply deals with gas shippers. The Transport Management department contracts transportation capacity with the grid operator being Gasunie Transport Services for the Dutch market. Finally Essent has it’s own natural gas storage from which it can withdraw gas to meet the demand. All these actions are necessary to aim for a balanced gas transportation network.

Project Background

GNS replaces two stand-alone solutions supporting Essents Gas Operations department. The project goals were to replace these stand-alone solutions and provide a new flexible solution to the Gas Operations department to support the daily changing natural gas market demands in a flexible way. A side effect was that also the Transport Management department processes are partly supported by GNS.

From a selected group of suppliers, Essents business representatives have chosen CIBER as the party to realize the GNS.

What made Essent decide to choose CIBER?

Various interviews with Essent employees made it clear that they had a strong believe in a tailor-made solution instead of a packaged solution. CIBER track record, our ability to execute the project and our systems knowledge and our offered project approach made it clear that the CIBER offer was the most feasible and realistic offer to do the job. The fact that the offered GNS solution and the related system architecture seamlessly fitted within Essents business applications landscape supported Essent in making the right decision.

Project Approach

From the initial discussions it was clear to us that the business requested a solution that tended to be a tailor-made (flexible) solution as their processes and market requirements were and are instable. The project execution shows us that our vision in this respect was the right one. Till late in the project changed requirements surfaced, which were handled in line with the DSDM prioritizations principles.

How did we cope?

Compared to traditional project approaches, we together with Essent decided to apply the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM). This Rapid Application Development approach – based on 9 principles – makes it possible to execute a project with changing requirements in time and in budget. One of the most important principles is Active User Involvement through collaboration of business users in the development team and inviting expert users. We agreed with Essents Gas Operation department that two of their most experienced gas operation specialists would be part of the GNS development team (on a part-time basis). These two ambassador users decided which GNS functionality should be included and excluded. In an iterative and incremental way the GNS system evolved from an initial prototype to a tested and validated system with fit for business purpose functionality. During the project execution the time boxing mechanism ensured us that the project team would meet it’s milestones per increment.

Interesting Technical Features

The GNS is build with the use of Oracle’s case tool Oracle Designer 6i in combination with the Oracle Headstart 6i package providing the CDM Rule Frame (work) solution for designing and implementing business rules. The system architecture is based on the 3-tier model. The GNS clients run in web browser, the application logic’s presentation layer (screens and reports) runs on an Oracle Application server and the data and application business logic is stored in an Oracle 8i database. This model makes it possible to grant access to the system in a very easy way as the standard Desktop configuration contains the browser plug-in software to run the GNS via the intranet.

Geographical Information System

GNS provides the end users with Geographical Information System (GIS) component, which can be dynamically configured and allows end-user interaction. This means that the end user can click on the GIS Map and depending on the object selected, the system will display context sensitive information in the Oracle GUI Form.

Project Deliverables

The project execution resulted in a series of valuable deliverables both for the end user community as for the maintenance crew.

What is contained in the GNS product?

• Master Data (e.g. customers, nodes, transportation routes, energy unit types)
• Contract Data (e.g. supply, transportation, conversion and storage contracts)
• Customer Demand collection (based on internet, history, forecast)
• Balancing Demand & Supply (supported by Geographical Information System User Interface)
• Reporting & Data Extraction
• System Services (e.g. system setup and configuration, journaling & audit trails)
• Alerting (e.g. threshold signaling, intraday contract update signaling)
• Online Help
• Various Interfaces to referenced and referencing systems

Additionally the project delivered the following system maintenance documentation:

• System Operations Guide
• System Technical Reference
• Oracle Designer – high quality – repository application system
• Application Development Standards
• Structured System Creation Scripts (data tables, business logic etc)

Trained Users

During the contract negotiations for the GNS project parties agreed to follow the so-called Train-The-Trainer concept. This effectively means training the key users of the GNS system who will train their colleagues in using the system. The approach has demonstrated a high degree of system acceptance and adoption in the end user community.

Results

The combination of business knowledge, selected project approach, active user involvement, chosen platform, perseverance and commitment has demonstrated a successful creation and implementation of the new Essents Gas Nomination System. The system is implemented without a shadow operations period and is delivered in time despite the huge time pressure. It is now supporting the operational business processes of the Gas Operations and Transport Management departments of Essent for nearly a month. We succeeded in delivering the system in a stable and reliable system environment supported by the CIBER maintenance staff, which is active as a Managed Service partner of Essent Energie.

Additionally CIBER colleagues have gained huge knowledge in the utilities sector especially in the natural gas area. Furthermore the project approach has a spin-off effect on new projects that will follow the DSDM approach as well. A side effect of working with the Oracle Designer CASE tool was the usage of a software development quality management system, which acted as enabler of high quality software.