A prominent energy midstream company operating in Western Canada, faced the challenge of upgrading their Endur system from an unsupported version v17 to v23, necessitating a thorough assessment to determine the complexity, cost, and feasibility of the upgrade. They needed to categorize the upgrade project into either homogeneous or heterogeneous, assess the total cost of ownership for different Endur versions, review technical aspects such as code, configuration, and dependencies, identify the scope of impact and incongruences between v17 and v23 solutions, and evaluate platform engineering and infrastructure requirements. Additionally, they sought to establish a robust quality assurance framework for testing the upgraded Endur system.
Increase in certainty on scope, cost, schedule, and risks.
Reduced total cost to deliver based on optimization recommendations
Identified risks due to disparities in critical solutions between v17 and v23 Endur
Reduced costs by leveraging shared tenants, cost optimization measures and FinOps practices
Value Creed’s comprehensive Endur Upgrade Advisory program addressed the client’s challenges through a strategic approach, incorporating key insights throughout:
Capability, Process & Implementation Mapping: A thorough assessment of capabilities, processes, and implementation requirements is crucial for effective project planning and decision-making. By developing solution blueprints across business verticals and engaging key stakeholders, Value Creed ensured a thorough understanding of requirements, fostering collaboration and alignment.
Conduct Version Selection Advisory: Careful consideration of Endur version selection based on business needs and risk assessment is paramount for maximizing the value and success of the upgrade. Through meticulous analysis considering risk appetite and solution architecture fitment, Value Creed facilitated strategic Endur version selection, maximizing the value of the upgrade.
Planning of Upgrade Project: Early detection and mitigation of risks are essential for minimizing disruptions and ensuring smooth project execution. Value Creed coordinated with ION, planned capacity, allocated resources, and managed risks, laying a robust foundation for a successful upgrade while ensuring efficient resource utilization.
Organizational Change Management: Identifying key stakeholders and devising effective communication strategies, Value Creed facilitated smooth transition and adoption of the upgraded Endur system, fostering stakeholder engagement and alignment.
Proactive Risk Identification: Early identification of potential pathways and risks was key to minimizing disruptions and ensuring seamless transitions. We identified 16+ risks including API depreciation, custom code conflicts, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Cost Optimization: With our experience in tackling issues and risk patterns in past Endur upgrades, we offered various insights and guidance. This approach not only facilitated optimal resource utilization but also enabled effective budget management, leading to successful project outcomes.
Our Advisory services not only will help you guide your operations but also help you achieve your vision by taking all stakeholders into consideration. Our highly experienced team has combined full lifecycle, functional and technical expertise to deliver frameworks and guidance around building reliable and scalable commodity trading businesses.
Our team is made up of industry-leading CTRM experts who help you model new business requirements to ensure a future-proof setup. We empower you to customize and enhance performance. Our primary focus is to optimize functionality across the board, aligning with market demands through a holistic solution.
Value Creed offers unparalleled expertise in upgrades, providing meticulous planning, substantial cost savings, early risk detection, stakeholder engagement, and cloud cost optimization. With a track record of success, we ensure seamless transitions, aligning Endur versions with business needs and mitigating potential disruptions. Our commitment to excellence and client satisfaction makes us the ideal partner for companies seeking efficient, cost-effective, and reliable upgrade solutions.
Performance Enhancement A leading global trading firm faced a significant challenge integrating trades from diverse external sources into their Endur ETRM system. With multiple ETRMs
Performance Enhancement A leading global trading firm faced significant challenges with their End-of-Day (EOD) processes. The complexities of trading across multiple markets and geographies, coupled
Performance Enhancement A Midstream producer sought to enhance the performance of their Endur ETRM system. Their primary goal was to streamline the Order to Cash
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A leading global trading firm faced a significant challenge integrating trades from diverse external sources into their Endur ETRM system. With multiple ETRMs catering to different commodities, the lack of a standardized validation process led to errors, delays, and increased operational overheads. Manual validation methods were time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies, posing risks to the integrity of trade data and regulatory compliance.
Improved Data Accuracy: Quarter on quarter from the time of deployment
Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Reduced errored trade count total trades per day
Risk Mitigation: Increase in timely reporting to trade repositories
Streamlined Reconciliation: Reduced manual verification hours for front-office (2 Desks & 7 Members)
Drawing upon our extensive expertise in ETRM systems and technology, we architected & developed a middleware layer that served as a data layer & pipeline between external trade sources and ETRM systems. Our solution incorporated the following critical components:
Centralized Validation Tier: By introducing a common validation tier for all ETRMs, our solution streamlines the validation process. Trades from external sources undergo validation before entering respective ETRMs, eliminating the need for multiple validation methods and reducing redundancy in the workflow.
Data Standardization: The middleware layer handles various data formats such as XML, JSON, and FIX, converting them into a standardized XML format. This standardization ensures uniformity in data processing and facilitates seamless integration with the validation tier.
Real-time Error Management: Our solution incorporates a dashboard within the validation framework, providing traders with real-time visibility into all trades entering the system. Any errored or misaligned trades are promptly flagged, allowing traders to review and rectify discrepancies efficiently. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of erroneous trades entering the ETRM systems.
Enhanced Trade Modeling: Through enhancements to the Endur data model and GUI screens using OpenComponent library extensions, our solution enables the modeling of complex trade structures such as multi-commodity trades, multi-parcel modules, and multileg trades in Endur. This capability ensures that trades from various external sources are interfaced into Endur without any errors or missing data, further optimizing the trading process.
Reduction of Reporting Errors: By pre-validating trade data before it enters the ETRM systems, our solution significantly reduces reporting errors, including those related to Profit and Loss (PnL) calculations and position reporting. This proactive validation approach minimizes manual work and reprocessing efforts, which would have been necessary to rectify incorrect trades at later stages in the trade lifecycle.
Audit Trail Enablement: Our solution provides comprehensive audit trails, capturing all trade validation activities and changes made by traders. These audit trails not only facilitate regulatory compliance but also support reconciliation efforts, ensuring transparency and accuracy in trade data management.
Unlock operational effectiveness and elevate the efficiency and reliability of your database through Value Creed’s services. Optimize performance with fast and accurate data extraction, reconciliation, calculation, and reporting.
Value Creed helps organizations integrate DevOps across CTRM and manage the cultural shift that perpetually feeds on itself to deliver continuous improvement and proactive identification and creation of desirable product features.
By centralizing validation, standardizing data formats, implementing real-time error management, enabling enhanced trade modeling, and reducing reporting errors, our solution empowers traders to operate with confidence, knowing that their data is accurate, processes are streamlined, and regulatory compliance is assured. Partner with Value Creed to navigate the complexities of the energy trading landscape with agility and precision, driving business growth and maintaining a competitive edge in the market.
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
A diversified energy company based in New York needed to upgrade its CTRM, but had no experience with major technical software upgrades in the past
Global Energy Company’s Ambitious Growth Goals Powered by Value Creed’s Seamless CTRM Upgrade The Imperative Challenge A global energy company engaged in natural gas production,
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A leading global trading firm faced significant challenges with their End-of-Day (EOD) processes. The complexities of trading across multiple markets and geographies, coupled with dependencies on various data sources and systems such as Endur, Price Publishing Houses, and SAP, resulted in frequent delays and operational inefficiencies. These delays not only impacted individual EOD closures but also caused cascading delays across multiple entities, leading to increased congestion and manual intervention.
Improved Agility: The solution architecture’s agility score increased by 45%
Reduced EOD Runtimes: End-of-day runtime delays decreased by 1.5 hours across three geographies
Cost Savings: Cost savings of $250,000 by minimizing manual labor involved in monitoring
Optimized EOD Integration: Value Creed suggested an event-driven EOD solution focused on micro-batching EOD activities by market areas, commodities, and book structures. The solution leveraged a common orchestration platform acting as a “TrafficCop” to seamlessly integrate Endur with external systems such as Price Publishing Houses and SAP. Two solution architectures were considered:
API Integration: This involved linking external systems with Endur’s Connex webservice gateway through APIs. API calls from external systems triggered Connex Methods, initiating the required tasks, processes, or workflows within Endur. Process logs were captured, and results were stored in the Endur database, with outputs shared back to the external systems via API connections.
DB Connect: The chosen architecture utilized JDBC connectivity to Endur’s database, allowing the BPO tool to instruct Endur on target jobs to be run. Data updates were pushed periodically or in real-time to Endur’s database, triggering tasks, processes, or workflows. Logs were maintained, and data updates were reflected in the database, with the option to transfer data to external systems.
Capabilities Enhanced: By streamlining EOD processes, the firm unlocked capabilities to leverage risk-as-a-service, valuation-as-a-service, and reconciliation-as-a-service, originating from Endur’s core capabilities. This integration allowed Endur to leverage the capabilities of other systems more effectively, enhancing overall operational efficiency and decision-making.
Integrated EOD Control: After conducting a thorough analysis, the client opted for the DB connect solution due to its cost-effectiveness and suitability for their needs. The capabilities modeled within Endur provided comprehensive control over essential actions during End-of-day (EOD) processes, including running tasks, workflows, scripts, and TPMs, while logging responses. These capabilities ensured that all in-scope activities for EOD were efficiently managed and monitored within the system.
Unlock operational effectiveness and elevate the efficiency and reliability of your database through Value Creed’s services. Optimize performance with fast and accurate data extraction, reconciliation, calculation, and reporting.
Value Creed’s expertise enabled the implementation of an event-driven EOD solution, optimizing integration across market areas, commodities, and systems. Interested in streamlining your energy trading operations? Reach out to explore how Value Creed can assist you in leveraging Business Process Orchestration for enhanced efficiency and risk management. Let’s streamline your operations together.
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
A diversified energy company based in New York needed to upgrade its CTRM, but had no experience with major technical software upgrades in the past
Global Energy Company’s Ambitious Growth Goals Powered by Value Creed’s Seamless CTRM Upgrade The Imperative Challenge A global energy company engaged in natural gas production,
Customize & improve business processes with Value Creed’s Implementation Services
A commodity trading firm wanted to maximize the efficiency of its gas trading operations. However, ensuring seamless coordination between Payment Date adjustments and nomination volumes, while avoiding disruptions like exposure drop-offs, presents a complex operational challenge. This necessitates innovative solutions to streamline processes, enhance accuracy, and align financial settlement with operational realities for sustained success in gas trading.
On Value Creed’s suggestion the company successfully implemented gas trading solution, integrating Physical and Financial Legs, to manage long-term gas supply contracts effectively in Endur. The solution addresses Payment Date dynamics, influencing both financial settlement and Physical Leg operations.
Efficiency Improvement from reduced manual efforts
Minimized Exposure Drop offs for a month
Timely Decision-Making with reduced discrepancies
Operational efficiency and reduced disruptions
To address crucial transformation requirements, Value Creed implemented the following strategic solutions:
Implement Endur AutoMatch Reconciliation: Introducing an automated reconciliation process to validate deals post-nomination efficiently.
Enhance Validity Filtering: Utilizing advanced algorithms to filter valid scenarios and prevent unnecessary flags for 0 volume nominations.
Enable Multi-Step Validation: Leveraging Endur modules we incorporate multiple validation steps to identify and address discrepancies promptly.
Initiate Contract Amendments: Swiftly amending contracts to synchronize Payment Dates with Delivery Dates, mitigating the risk of premature Physical Leg drop-offs.
Facilitate Ongoing Monitoring: Encouraging proactive monitoring by Operators and the Risk Team to assess and mitigate risks associated with exposure dropoffs.
Unlock operational effectiveness and elevate the efficiency and reliability of your database through Value Creed’s services. Optimize performance with fast and accurate data extraction, reconciliation, calculation, and reporting.
With a comprehensive approach, Value Creed tackles gas trading challenges by assessing and implementing solutions. By harnessing Endur tools like AutoMatch reconciliation and advanced algorithms, we drive measurable improvements, ensuring operational efficiency, minimizing risks, and delivering reliable results. Opting for Value Creed guarantees a strategic approach to optimizing gas trading operations.
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
A diversified energy company based in New York needed to upgrade its CTRM, but had no experience with major technical software upgrades in the past
Global Energy Company’s Ambitious Growth Goals Powered by Value Creed’s Seamless CTRM Upgrade The Imperative Challenge A global energy company engaged in natural gas production,
Customize & improve business processes with Value Creed’s Implementation Services
A Midstream producer sought to enhance the performance of their Endur ETRM system. Their primary goal was to streamline the Order to Cash Process, reducing turnaround times, and ensuring efficient operations across deal lifecycle stages, scheduling, and accounting interfaces.
While the client’s Endur ETRM landscape exhibited robust functionality, there were opportunities for improvement, particularly during peak periods like month ends and times of high utilization with numerous user logins. Moreover, the system experienced some challenges in managing increased interfacing throughput, which affected overall operational effectiveness. To address these opportunities, Value Creed proposed leveraging performance engineering principles to systematically optimize the application-level performance metrics of the Endur ETRM system, aligning it more closely with the client’s evolving needs.
Production Outage Reduction
Month-End Stability Achievement
Database Peak Load Reduction
Remediation of Month-End Critical Path
Operational Impacts: Client business teams encountered Database deadlocks and system slowness during peak usage, including high user logins, led to severe delays in the Order to Cash Process, potentially impacting revenue by $1.5 million monthly.
Two-Phased Approach: Value Creed’s Performance Engineering program for the client followed a two-phased approach: Assessment and Implementation.
Assessment Phase: Workshops were conducted with business teams and SMEs for a comprehensive understanding of processes, pain points, and technical challenges. Critical paths were identified, and Product Backlogs (PBIs) were created to address performance issues and outline strategic improvements.
Implementation Phase: Prioritized PBIs were based on criticality and business value, emphasizing two types: Enabler PBIs for implementing instrumentation with Azure Application Insights, and Performance fix PBIs addressing critical paths within the system.
Azure Application Insights: Facilitated performance tracking with application dashboards, availability view, alerts, logs, and user/session/event tracking.
Performance Enhancements: included code and SQL optimizations, business process improvements, and technical changes.
Post-implementation: Improvements were measured using Azure Dashboards against application logs, ensuring tangible performance gains.
Unlock operational effectiveness and elevate the efficiency and reliability of your database through Value Creed’s services. Optimize performance with fast and accurate data extraction, reconciliation, calculation, and reporting.
Value Creed helps organizations integrate DevOps across CTRM and manage the cultural shift that perpetually feeds on itself to deliver continuous improvement and proactive identification and creation of desirable product features.
Value Creed ensures a holistic approach to performance challenges with meticulous assessment and implementation phases. By leveraging cutting-edge technologies like Azure Application Insights, Value Creed delivers measurable enhancements, yielding tangible results, ensuring seamless operations, and maximizing revenue potential. Choosing Value Creed guarantees a comprehensive strategy addressing performance hurdles in Endur ETRM systems.
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
A diversified energy company based in New York needed to upgrade its CTRM, but had no experience with major technical software upgrades in the past
Global Energy Company’s Ambitious Growth Goals Powered by Value Creed’s Seamless CTRM Upgrade The Imperative Challenge A global energy company engaged in natural gas production,
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In a rapidly evolving market, being efficient is a key competitive edge. A global trading firm with diverse operations across all major commodities was facing issues with their manual processes for Natural Gas Pipeline Tariffs. Users were facing the burdensome task of manually scraping tariffs from numerous pipeline websites, monitoring these sites for changes without clear notification, and painstakingly inputting tariff data line by line into Endur. Moreover, market data changes, especially tariffs, incur substantial reconfiguration costs. Modern API interfaces for tariff imports reduce manual work, enhance customization, and streamline tariff management within the Endur system, improving ETRM efficiency.
Our proposed solution enhances decision-making by driving competitive advantage and efficiency gains. The NatGasHub.com integration offers benefits related to gas scheduling, real-time tracking, mobile accessibility, and tech support. The integration also eliminates the need for a manual data entry process and daily monitoring of various gas pipeline websites.
Onboarded Pipelines
Tariff records across the pipelines
Success Rate for Tariff Import
Built a reconciliation script for the interface for error handling
Processing over 1000 tariff records in ~10 seconds
In the ever-evolving world of natural gas trading, seamless integration and streamlined processes are crucial for efficient operations. We have worked on this integration by creating a custom-built interface that seamlessly integrates Tariff data from NatGasHub.com into Endur. The interface enables NGH’s secure, pre-built API to easily access standardized tariffs for all pipelines across all gas scheduling systems, without the need for manual coding.
Unlock operational effectiveness and elevate the efficiency and reliability of your database through Value Creed’s services. Optimize performance with fast and accurate data extraction, reconciliation, calculation, and reporting.
In a fast-paced market, efficiency is key. By leveraging Value Creed’s expertise in Endur implementation and customizations, we have harnessed the full potential of NatGasHub.com integration. The increased accuracy in the availability of tariff data in your trading system will lead to a more effective nomination process. Automation of tariffs also facilitated a closer alignment between the client’s monthly invoices and those from the pipeline. The pathing was optimized for greater efficiency, resulting in improved invoicing. Our improved solution not only strengthened energy trading operations but also elevated decision-making capabilities, fostering efficiency and competitiveness in the energy market.
Performance Challenge A global commodity merchant who trades in a wide variety of financial and physical markets was facing issues with data integration. Resorting to
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
Performance Challenge One of our downstream clients that uses RightAngle, faced significant challenges due to the rapid growth of their database. In just three months,
Customize & improve business processes with Value Creed’s Implementation Services