Powering Enterprise Growth through Commodity Trading and Quoting

A large natural gas marketer recently completed acquisitions as part of its growth strategy to increase and diversify its customers, suppliers, and geographic locations. The speed of acquisition and diversity in retail customers, suppliers, geographic locations, and business transactions resulted in disconnected business processes and technology solutions. This created operational inefficiencies and risk as front/mid/back-office teams had to use disparate systems and processes to complete daily activities. Customer service varied widely by region, with multiple customer portals in use dependent on which prior company served the customer, and no single view of all customer activity. Additionally, reporting across the portfolio for operational and financial analytics was cumbersome and costly, limiting top-down visibility into performance metrics and inhibiting a data-driven firm-wide strategy. The client engaged MRE to develop an integrated lead generation, price quoting and trade lifecycle solution to streamline its systems and processes and redefine the customer experience. The new integrated Endur and Salesforce solution would serve 15,000 retail customers at over 30,000 locations and 300+ business users in a unified system with a single customer portal.

MRE designed and implemented an integrated Endur and Salesforce trade lifecycle management system which replaced the legacy systems with a single integrated platform.

MRE extended the customer’s Salesforce platform with the implementation of a custom quoting tool with real-time contract pricing from Endur, integrated trade execution and lifecycle management within Endur. This enabled real-time pricing of quotes within Salesforce and streamlined retail C&I (commercial & industrial) contract execution while standardizing pricing structures across regions.

MRE designed a new consolidated portal for C&I customers using Salesforce Experience Cloud. Customers could go online to access historical invoices, usage data, and pay bills all within a mobile responsive experience. Larger industrial customers were also provided access to historical fixed price commitments and near real-time pricing to help encourage fixed price contract activity.

From Sales prospecting through settlements, users now have a single pipeline to conduct all C&I business, reducing effort overhead, providing visibility into financial performance, and enabling reporting across all regions and customers to support decisions on business strategy.

The solution included:

• Unified business processes through system consolidation and pricing standardization, including the migration of 15,000 contracts into a singular data structure
• Real-time pricing of quotes via Salesforce Lightning framework and custom Endur integration including basis prices, weather, pipeline capacity, and other external market factors
• Automation to proactively auto-renew contracts or identify expiring contracts in bulk and support full contract lifecycle management: new contract generation, renewals, amendments, and termination
• A customer portal that provides access to historical usage and invoices, NYMEX pricing, contract exposure, and communication preferences