Essent retools processes to boost profits

Essent Energie had two big problems. First, the company’s gas portfolio was expanding faster than conventional reporting tools could record the details. This led to the second problem: The portfolio consistently underperformed, as energy traders were flying blind. It often took a week to figure out if a deal actually made money.

Fixing the situation wasn’t easy. Essent’s employees had to overhaul their business processes while integrating a multitude of IT applications to provide an end-to-end view of the company’s gas-management efforts. “It was crucial to build a cutting-edge middleware infrastructure which could allow all these disparate applications to talk to each other seamlessly,” says Gareth Griffiths, head of Essent’s Gas and Coal Trading Desk.

With help from consultant Sapient, Essent’s project team identified the critical points in the delivery structure, and then created a custom Gas Optimization application based on Java system interfaces, Oracle database technology, and MathWorks’ Matlab processing engines to optimize the gas portfolio’s return. Developers then used Tibco integration tools to tie the systems together in real time.

The ROI on the Gas Optimization project was spectacular — within the first 24 hours, the solution paid for itself by raking in an extra €4 million, company officials say. Essent expects the flexible architecture and cross-application data capability to improve decision-making as well.