BP Canada Energy Marketing Corp.
.NET Enterprise Servers solution built by Quilogy accelerates 800 percent business growth
Published: August 21, 2001
When BP Canada Energy Marketing Corp. and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Quilogy designed and built the Gas Order Trading System (GOTS) on Microsoft® .NET Enterprise Servers, TransCanada acquired a solution agile enough to turn the accelerating pace of change in the natural gas market to its advantage. GOTS connects the company’s trading partners at Web speed so it can respond to daily fluctuations in the marketplace faster than competitors. The result—$1.8 billion in gross sales last year at significantly reduced operating costs.
The Challenge
Finding an Agile Platform
The natural gas marketing business is inherently unpredictable. So BP Canada Energy Marketing Corp’s (“BP Canada”) ability to respond quickly to changes in weather, prices, supply and demand, while complying with complex regulations, defines its position in the marketplace. The company acquires natural gas from vendors and arranges for the transportation and delivery of requested quantities to large commercial, industrial, utility and municipal markets. Coordinating the various needs of its trading partners—customers (who may change their orders several times a day), vendors, pipeline companies and financial markets—while optimizing prices and delivery routes used to be the responsibility of expert “gas controllers” who manipulated data using multiple spreadsheets.
“As the number of adjustments, routes and transactions increased, tracking, management and billing got out of control, leading to costly errors,” says Greg Miller, Manager, MIS at BP Canada. “We needed to automate our business processes to keep pace with market demands.”
Compounding the problem, BP Canada had been gradually replacing its outdated Novell network and the multiple platforms that had created a money drain for a company of its size. “The cost of operating four different operating systems and three hardware platforms, and a lack of flexibility, scalability and reliability forced us into making a complete change,” says Miller.
The Solution
Engaging with Quilogy, Building on Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers
BP Canada partnered with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, Quilogy, to design and develop a Gas Order Trading System (GOTS) on Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers. GOTS is a distributed, n-tier, Microsoft Visual Basic® client/server application, with Web-based components, that allows the company to plug any information related to its trading partners or the business process into a standardized system for a single point of access to the data. It connects BP Canada with its trading partners and opens up new ways to integrate business, improving customer service and driving revenue. For example, employees used to receive order quantity changes by phone and fax. Now they receive customer requested quantity changes through a secure active server page, and they can process the change in seconds. Customers and vendors can request natural gas order changes via a secure Active Server Page (ASP) application. The Web application can also provide instant confirmation of scheduled quantities.
“BP Canada and Quilogy effectively designed, architected, implemented and supported a $1.8 billion/year mission-critical business solution on a very tight schedule,” says Miller.
The Benefits of Standardizing on Microsoft
BP Canada standardized on Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, which provide the most economical technology foundation, built on industry standards – a foundation that enables fluid response to a highly volatile business. “Microsoft technology transformed our business processes by providing the agility we needed to grow our company at a price we could afford,” says Miller. “By standardizing on Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional, we have become proficient in the utilization of the system and have reduced training and system operating costs.”
“In the trading room, we were able to reduce the number of computers per user by half when we converted to the Windows 2000 platform. This saved on hardware, software, maintenance, electricity, and square footage requirements per user.”
The daily operations of BP Canada’s systems and helpdesk functions are performed by two IT professionals. “We are required to provide a high level of service per employee because we have a very high gross revenue per employee,” explains Miller. “Because of the standards we have in place, we can efficiently administer 30 servers with two IT staff and accommodate sick time, vacation, training and special projects for 34 employees.”
Miller also cites the spectrum of tools and technologies available as a key benefit in standardizing on the Microsoft platform. “We can select all the tools we need from a single source at an economical price. I consider the Microsoft product line a huge resource advantage, one that I intend to utilize fully to provide a substantial advantage over our competitors.”
Standardizing its development platform on Microsoft Visual Studio® 6.0, BP Canada is reaping the benefits of a single language syntax that spans multiple tasks or systems. “We’ve gained great efficiencies using the same language across multiple projects, or within one project that utilizes multiple services,” says Miller.
As a result, training time is limited to two weeks per year and trainings costs are reduced accordingly. “We have developed GOTS with minimal staff: three developers performing all maintenance and ‘base load’ programming,” reports Miller. “We have had as many as six for the ‘peak load’ of the development cycle. Quilogy provides highly trained developers and technical designers of Visual Basic so that we can easily scale a project up or down as needed.”
While BP Canada worked on the client/server application, the same staff built the Web site using ASP and Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript). “At the same time, we added specific user applications in Excel and Access that use Visual Basic (VB); this enhances individual performance and data access,” says Miller. “We are now able to provide more service and access with a very small staff. This was impossible in our prior situation.”
Benefits
.NET Enterprise Servers for the Agile Business
Speed in responding to the daily fluctuations in customer demand, weather and market price distinguish customer service in this business. The GOTS gas nomination system allows BP Canada staff to leverage a rich client with the power of distributed computing to deliver gas more efficiently to consumers. Thanks to the tight integration between COM+ and Microsoft SQL Server™, the company has raised customer service to a new level in the industry.
Prior to GOTS, BP Canada was constrained by the volume of data and the speed of data processing. Now the company can process more transactions at higher velocities, at a lower average cost. “We are saving at least $4.00 per transaction with the new system,” says Miller. “Last year we didn’t have to replace two staff members who left the company.”
With the business logic and data access embedded in middle tier Visual Basic components running under COM+, the company is not constrained by hardware or software in choosing appropriate client interfaces to improve its reach and connect with its many trading partners. “We can use a Web interface, wireless PDA, a traditional client/server interface, or none at all. We’re taking existing components that used to have biological interfaces and replacing them with full automation,” says Miller.
Growing the Business 800 Percent
Because GOTS is built on Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers, BP Canada can integrate with third party solutions, connecting business applications, systems and processes to drive operational efficiency. “GOTS easily integrated with our Great Plains accounting solution, enabling a stable and fully functional accounting system that has been adapted to our needs,” says Miller. “GOTS has accelerated our 800 percent, four year growth in business volume and allowed us to reduce our staff in the process.”
And when BP Canada integrates its Sungard Epsilon Order Entry System using Microsoft BizTalk™ Server 2000, it will fully automate the pricing process, saving an estimated 500 labor hours a month. “Gas schedulers can spend more time finding better routes to reduce the cost of transportation,” says Miller. “The GOTS application provides a competitive advantage, and the Microsoft platform offers a stable infrastructure to which we can add new productivity enhancing systems, such as B2B processing for our high volume vendors and customers. With this solution, we’ll continue to differentiate our services well into the future.”