May 6, 2014 (Houston, TX) – ENSYTE announces that its natural gas software solution, GASTAR™, has been selected by one of the largest electric and natural gas distribution companies in the U.S. to support and manage natural gas trade capture, scheduling, storage and accounting business processes. The organization delivers natural gas to approximately 1.2 million customers across two states.
A comprehensive Request for Proposal (RFP) process was used to evaluate the top vendors of Commodity Trading Risk Management (CTRM) solutions, and GASTAR was determined to be the best fit for the utility’s requirements with regards to overall software features, an aggressive project timeline, and an attractive life-cycle cost of ownership. The implemented software will serve as a sub-ledger, transaction manager, and report generator for the company’s gas commodity purchases and pipeline transportation and storage transactions.
In addition to trade capture and gas scheduling, key features include the Storage WACOG, Asset Management, and Capacity Release business processes, as well as significant Weighted Average Cost of Gas (WACOG) reporting for city gate gas deliveries. Also key to the project is a comprehensive Gas Accounting Module, which is one of the strongest features of the GASTAR solution for interstate/off-system gas acquisition and on-system transportation business processes. The Accounting Module integrates all front and mid office business processes to provide invoice generation, vendor reconciliations, manual journal entries and other features to fully support an interface directly into a General Ledger (GL) worksheet and related corporate accounting systems. The Gas Accounting Module contains an accrual and actualization path for managing the gas accounting process.
The project is planned as a multi-utility implementation with a second utility to be addressed next year. A key feature of GASTAR is the ability to seamlessly handle multiple utilities within the same application and database software, further streamlining and simplifying the workflow for managing multiple utilities where consolidation of certain business practices is important. This feature applies to both the off and on-system business practices for the gas utility.
