Union Gas’s Energy Service for the Power Market (ESPM) project was primarily focused on enhancing the suite of services offered by Union Gas for its ex-franchise power generator customers. As part of this project, a number of new services were defined and implemented to better meet the needs of these customers. These new firm hourly services provide customers with the ability to request natural gas more frequently throughout the day in order to react to the fluctuating conditions in the electricity market.

Scope of Services

• Consulting during the conceptual phase of the project to help client prepare for regulatory approval. This included assessing the impact on business groups and information systems, and preparing high level estimates and schedules.
• Lead the business analysis phase of the project to define business rules for new services, define new business processes and streamline existing processes
• Provide a detailed technical design and specifications for the implementation of functional requirements. This technical design covered changes to the gas management system and e-commerce system
• Implementation of the technical design using Oracle 10g, Power Builder 9, and Microsoft.NET technologies
• Support and coordination of user acceptance testing and implementation of systems into production environment
• Project management services including project scheduling, project estimating, monitoring of budget and deliverable statuses, and execution of change management procedures

Project Highlights

• Project team met an extremely tight deadline within the scope, budget, and quality constraints established for the project
• Implemented services at the forefront of the North American gas industry to allow for the ability to request (nominate) as frequently as every 15 minutes in addition to supporting the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) daily nomination windows
• Re-modeled gas management business processes and work flows to include hourly processes in addition to daily
• Automated gas management business processes to run overnight without any human intervention
• Innovative scheduling algorithm was implemented to  maximize revenue by minimizing capacity that needed to be reserved for hourly services 
• Designed and developed intuitive user interfaces for both the customer-facing web system and the internal user system
• Managed an integrated project team of both Hatch and client resources that was geographically dispersed
• Managed the impact of multiple parallel projects Redesigned and built reporting solutions to reflect the impact of these new services on a number of key operational and financial indicators