Background
This energy corporation is an energy company
that provides natural gas and related energy products. They own a large
percentage of North America’s interstate natural gas pipeline and frequently
deal with other energy vendors when purchasing additional assets.
They were running into a common problem of
dealing with vendor data that was formatted according to each one’s own system
they deal with. They would have to manually copy vendor data (which usually
came in a spreadsheet) into their own spreadsheet and then run some macros on
that spreadsheet in order to get an output file that was sufficient for the
acquisition system that this company currently uses. Needless to say, this was a
laborious process that was consuming valuable time and resources.
Requirements
What they wanted to achieve They wanted to build a process to be able to import
their vendor data directly into their acquisition system. The solution had to
be able to handle each vendor’s file format as well as translate some of the
vendor specific terms into their own. And which ever solution they chose, it
would have to be maintainable as vendors and their proprietary formats were
added all of the time.
Solution
In the end, this world-wide energy company chose Centerprise as the solution. Centerprise was able to
help them by providing an easy to use UI allowing them to quickly map the vendor
fields to their own. They also took advantage of Centerprise’s static lookup
functionality to translate vendor specific codes.
Now, anytime this company
has to integrate data from an existing vendor (or a vendor who uses a familiar
system), they simply launch Centerprise and open up the transfer setting
corresponding to that specific vendor file format. And even if it is a brand
new vendor, a brand-new transfer setting can be created in a matter of minutes
and saved for reuse.