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Who will TIES benefit

Marketing manager

Get a real-time view of positions for better decision making

Your Challenge:

Position keeping in spreadsheets or on whiteboards leads to stale data and bad trading decisions.

The marketing manager needs to be able to view their market position across the entire portfolio. Where there are multiple people in the team who are trading, this is a challenge using old style spreadsheet or whiteboard based approaches. Every time there is a new trade, the spreadsheet or whiteboard needs to be updated and positions manually recalculated.

Our Solution:

With TIES you get a complete view of position exposure across all market locations that can be shared across all traders. As soon as trades are updated in the system, positions are updated and everyone can see the latest exposure.

Our virtual whiteboard tool provides a real-time view of positions that can be configured by individual traders to display what is most important to them. Also a composite view can be displayed on a large screen in a classic whiteboard format.

Value Delivered:

This means that the marketing manager and the traders have real-time visibility of all trading activities for better decision making.

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Accurately forecast production

Your Challenge:

Accurately forecasting production is critical for trading

Marketing managers rely on forecasts to know what they have to trade during each month. However, forecasting is often reliant on best guess manual calculations based on the previous month’s production figures.

Our Solution:

TIES supports the modeling of plants using sophisticated techniques including Plant Volume

Reduction/PVR, using the comprehensive range of data that is already in the system. This enables the generation of more accurate production forecasts for gas and NGLs, on demand.

Value Delivered:

You can update forecasts quickly to take account of changing circumstances. And greater accuracy in forecasting allows you to be more aggressive in taking advantage of trading opportunities.

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Operations manager

Get instant insight and a commercial head start when there are downstream cuts

Your Challenge:

Dealing with downstream cuts

When there is cut in available capacity on a downstream pipeline, the operations manager needs to balance everything all the way back to the upstream source and understand what needs to be redirected to storage or sold in secondary markets. This is a complex problem to analyze – taking a significant length of time when done manually.

Our Solution:

With TIES if there is a volume cut in a downstream pipeline, that cut in volume will be reflected back to all upstream connected segments.

With one click you can instantly get an updated position/balance, know what volume you need to redirect and the associated transactions required.

Value Delivered:

With information in hand quickly you have a clear commercial advantage over other impacted players; for example, to sell excess gas on a secondary market before prices fall, avoid unnecessary storage costs or imbalance penalties.

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Make optimal use of firm capacity in trading and scheduling

Your Challenge:

Infrastructure constraints focus attention on capacity utilization and optimization

Infrastructure in many locations has become capacity constrained due to new shale production coming online very rapidly. This applies to both upstream (well heads to gathering systems) and midstream (central delivery point into the processing plant and to downstream pipes) infrastructure. As a result, reservation and demand charges are creeping up so there is more focus on managing capacity.

Our Solution:

TIES provides unique tools and reporting for greater visibility over procured and available capacity in upstream and midstream operations.

Our solution outputs utilization metrics and highlights stranded costs associated with under-utilization.

Value Delivered:

Make optimal use of firm capacity in trading and scheduling, and avoid maximum daily quantity (MDQ) penalties.

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Publish imbalances on the TIES website to allow shippers to see positions on demand

Your Challenge:

Communicating imbalance positions is labor intensiven

Gathering system operators have to manage their account for any discrepancies between the produced and delivered volumes, and communicate that inventory or imbalance position back to the shippers. This is typically managed via phone and typically positions are communicated infrequently.

Our Solution:

Gathering system operators can use the TIES website to publish imbalances to customers, eliminating the requirement for telephone calls.

The website is updated in real-time

Value Delivered:

Gathering system operators can use the TIES website to publish imbalances to customers, eliminating the requirement for telephone calls. The website is updated in real-time.

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Contracts manager

Capture non-standard contract terms in the system to reduce manual effort and risk

Your Challenge:

Contract optionality and tracking non-standard provisions

Because of low gas prices, processors are getting more creative in contract optionality to maximize revenue. For example, contracts may include terms stipulating no capping, plant efficiency factors (for example, percentage of gas lost), line pressure guarantees, or gas quality requirements (for example, sulphur or CO2 content). It is complex for contract managers to track non-standard provisions – often working outside the main system in a spreadsheet.

Our Solution:

The built-in flexibility of OpenLink’s TIES makes it straightforward to capture non-standard contract terms, including conditional fees, in the system and configure the required invoices and reports.

The system can also consume field data relevant to contract terms, including CO2 readings from meters, line pressure, lab analysis data and daily volumetric reports – interfaces for standard instrumentation solutions including FlowCal and SCADA are available out-of-the-box.

Value Delivered:

Capturing these terms and provisions in the system eliminates the manual effort and risk involved in working in spreadsheets. Further, contracts and accounting managers can generate customer statements more easily and reduce the number of prior period adjustments (PPAs).

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Accounting manager

Use a single solution from Front to Back Office to streamline invoicing and reporting

Your Challenge:

Manual processing of volumes, deals and contract terms results in errors

The accounting manager receives data from the scheduling group (volumes moved) and the trading/marketing group (deals done, prices) and the contracts group (including terms of contracts for purchaser sales and transportation). This data is then copied across into settlement spreadsheets, and contract terms have to be applied manually to figure out what billing should look like.

Our Solution:

With Trilogy’s TIES people in scheduling, contracts and marketing are working in the same system.

So all the relevant data (including volumes, deals/prices and contract terms) is already in the system ready for the accounting manager to create invoices or generate reports. Importantly, TIES is a mature application rich in functionality, so there’s no compromise between having one integrated solution and having the necessary depth of functionality.

Value Delivered:

Save time, reduce errors and improve accuracy in invoicing and forecasting, as well as distributing imbalance statements and ultimately reducing the number of prior period adjustments (PPAs).

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Manage multiple inter-company entities and roles in the same solution

Your Challenge:

The need to set up the same entity in two different systems for receivables and payables

Many gas shippers/producers use pipelines where they are the owner/operator and pipelines that are owned by third parties. Because transactions related to these two different scenarios need to be handled by accounting systems as receivables in one case and payables in the other, two different systems are typically used.

Our Solution:

Uniquely, TIES allows you to set up multiple inter-company entities to manage your operations as both an owner and a service provider.

This means you can account for transactions relating to gas shippers transporting on their own pipelines and as well as third-party transportation service providers (TSP). For example, you could have entities set up as a marketing company, a production company and even an operating group within the same parent company to support inter-company transactions.

Value Delivered:

Managing inter-company transactions and relationships together in a single system eliminates the requirement to input the same data in different places. Furthermore you can generate reports on operations across both owner/operator and third party owned pipelines from the single system, eliminating the need for manual aggregation of figures.

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More accurate revenue forecasting for accrual reporting

Your Challenge:

Requirement for plant forecasting to drive accurate financial reporting

Accounting managers rely on plant forecasts to forecast revenue. However, forecasting is often reliant on best guess manual calculations based on the previous months’ production figures.

Our Solution:

Trilogy’s TIES supports the theoretical allocation of an operated gas processing plant as well as modeling of third-party non-operated plants.

You can calculate Plant Volume Reductions (PVR modeling), Residue Gas, and liquid (NGLs) proceed estimates to generate extremely accurate revenue forecasts prior to gas flow.

Value Delivered:

Get accurate production forecasts so you can be more confident in reporting revenue forecasts to management and investors.

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IT manager

Ensure high availability and end-to-end data integrity

Your Challenge:

Use of spreadsheets is a compliance concern

Using spreadsheets is a compliance concern for IT managers. There is the risk of losing data because it may not be backed up. Also without controls, data can be accidentally or fraudulently altered.

Our Solution:

TIES provides a single solution across the firm from upstream production and midstream operations to trading, marketing and accounting functions.

It has been proven in production environments for over 10 years, and can be run in a fault-tolerant configuration with hot standby to a secondary site for high availability.

Value Delivered:

With our solution all data and transactions are captured and stored with change control and audit capabilities to ensure the business is SOX compliant

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