With all of our information in one system, we’re really going to see a lot of benefits.
Manager, Settlement & Financial Reporting, natural gas supplier
What We Faced
Challenge
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.
Implemented Technologies
Endur Energy Trading & Risk Management (ETRM)
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Custom Platform Quoting Solution
MuleSoft
What We Did
Solution
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
What We Delivered
Results
We closed last night on schedule… and I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth things went. New schedulers in the system kept things up to date during the month, so there was not a mad scramble to get things done yesterday…I feel confident that the scheduling group did well for the first month in the system
volume administration director, natural gas supplier
The integrated Endur and Salesforce solution improved business process efficiency, confidence in contract pricing, and technology performance and stability by migrating to simplified technology solution:
- Integrated position management, exposure reporting and settlement processing
- Reduced manual reconciliation and risk of imbalance payments, penalties and overrun charges
- Standardized reporting across all regions, enabling performance evaluation and financial analytics
- Improved customer experience and Sales analytics via a single, holistic view of all customer activity
- Standardized pricing within regions and customer pools to maximize profitability, improve business process efficiency, and increase scalability of contract terms.
- Increased ROI realization for an underutilized Sales Cloud implementation
This solution is currently in use by the company and supports the full natural gas customer lifecycle from sales to settlements.
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