How a 3.5-million-customer utility replaced its gas trading system and saved over $5 million a quarter

One of the largest electric and gas utilities on the East Coast, serving nearly 3.5 million customers, replaced its home-grown gas transaction system with a modern Energy Trading and Risk Management platform. Agile Brains came in as system integrator nine months into the implementation, took the platform live ten months later, and the deployment now saves the company over $5 million a quarter.

The Energy Management and IT Application teams had selected the FIS Energy Trading, Risk and Logistics platform, formerly Aligne, to handle high trading volumes, tighten risk controls, and meet regulatory requirements.

The challenge

The project was planned for 18 months. Nine months in, senior leadership recognized it needed a true system integrator. The platform would carry natural gas trading and forecasting of nearly $200 million a month, under SOX compliance and strict process and data-reporting requirements. The company needed a defined implementation plan, detailed requirements, a QA validation phase, training, deployment, and hyper-care support. Agile Brains was brought in as system integrator with a mandate to deploy the product, document the process, and train internal staff within 12 months.

How we helped

Discovery. We started with the end users, capturing the current-state functional design so the vendor could configure the product accurately. The work was organized across the front office (pipeline gas nominations, storage inventory, power scheduling and spot bidding), the middle office (billing and analysis around weighted average cost of gas, booking summaries, P&L and risk reporting), and the back office (regulatory AP/AR reporting and integrations with pipeline EDI, the Intercontinental Exchange, the Oracle suite, and other automation interfaces).

Delivery plan. An agile project plan defined the backlog of configurations and reports that made up the minimum viable solution. An exit criteria document set out readiness by category: cyber security scanning; three parallel cycles of monthly accrual and reporting within a 1% tolerance on an AP basis, including powerplant over-burns and under-burns, steam plant consumption, weather-adjusted volumes and winter programs; detailed operational playbooks; SOX audit compliance process narratives; and more than 50 accounting and operational reports covering sales, storage activity and reconciliation, supplier allocations, capacity release, monthly transactions, powerplant invoices, accrual summaries, and inventory and balance reporting.

Execution. Our goal was transparency and a timely implementation, so the whole delivery ran in Azure DevOps on a custom Scrum process with value stream epics, features, user stories, bugs and RAID logs. Interactive dashboards tracked progress by business value stream and functional delivery. After ten months of system integration oversight the platform was declared ready for go-live. It remains the company's system of record.

The result

The utility now runs a cloud-native platform for trading, risk management and operations of physical energy commodities, managing nearly $200 million a month in gas trading and risk. Customized reporting supports internal forecasting and analysis as well as SOX regulatory reporting, with a full breakdown of pipeline reporting, asset management agreements, storage injections and withdrawals, winter marketer programs, and the overall accrual process for operational optimization. The energy management team was trained on the new process, technology and communication, and two-week sprints cut the delivery cycle from weeks to days.

By the numbers

• Over $5 million per quarter in savings from readiness and deployment of the new ETRM platform
• A further $2 million a year projected by the company's Business Cost Optimization initiative from streamlined trading, risk management and gas operations
• Nearly $200 million a month in gas commodity trading and risk managed on the new platform
• Over 50 customized reports delivered for internal forecasting, analysis and SOX regulatory reporting
• 30+ energy management team members trained on process, technology and communication
• Feature delivery and bug-fix cycle time reduced from over 20 days to under 7 with two-week sprints
• Go-live after 10 months of system integration oversight