Most Natural Gas Schedulers experience a large amount redundancy in their day-to-day operations.  Typically, they manage their positions and balance their pipelines in a spreadsheet. They then must enter the nominations data into the individual pipeline EBB systems. Finally, and sometimes days or weeks later, they enter the nominations into the CTRM system. Some schedulers have reported spending as much as 25% of their time on this redundant data entry. In a world of AI, cloud computing and self-driving cars, gas scheduling is clinging to the 1970s.

Automation

Lucido has taken on this problem in two different ways. One approach is to automate the data entry from a scheduler’s spreadsheet into the CTRM. The other approach is to automate data directly from the pipeline EBB systems into the CTRM.

Spreadsheet to CTRM

Almost every scheduler balances and maintains their nominations in a spreadsheet. They then enter this data directly into the pipeline EBBs. What if a scheduler could then hit a button in Excel and automatically create nominations in their CTRM system? Customers that have a standard spreadsheet model for their pipelines could benefit from this approach. Using a custom plugin, we have automated nomination creation directly from Excel into a CTRM system. This asynchronous process allows the scheduler to continue working on other pipelines or tasks while their nominations are automatically created in the CTRM. And yes, we have confirmed that tasks that were taking minutes to hours were completed, with no errors (i.e. – fat finger), in the push of a button.

EBB to CTRM

EBBs publish daily files to their participants which contain the activity of the previous days pathed details. While these files from the EBBs are disparate, each is readable and able to be imported to a standard format into a CTRM system. Once imported, paths are created from the relevant entries in the file with some configuration to translate and map the file entries to the CTRM. This process may occur on a schedule or by invocation by the scheduler.

Automation Benefits

• Save schedulers valuable time
• Eliminate redundant data entry
• Reduce errors in manual entry
• Improves speed of updates into the CTRM

We Can Help

Our team has more than a decade of experience working with CTRM systems, Natural Gas Scheduling, and automation. If you are interested in automating NG Scheduling into your CTRM system, please reach out!