EnergyFlow is a platform for automating and managing business processes and for integrating systems.

It has been specifically designed for the energy industry supporting operation, settlement, trading, reporting and alarming needs for electricity, gas and carbon markets.

The platform is highly extensible and configurable allowing customers to modify processes, business rules and calculations without requiring coding changes.

EnergyFlow integrates with all types of systems used in energy operations including energy trading and risk management systems, dispatch and logistic systems and market bidding and counterparty nomination interfaces.

The Problem

Modern energy companies must interact with various markets and counterparties with a plethora of technologies, data and processing requirements.

These markets require complex gathering, processing and dissemination of data, usually within tight deadlines. Activities include preparation of bids and offers, nominations for supply and transportation, settlement, record keeping and reporting for internal and external stakeholders. Often this work is completed manually with spreadsheets or using in-house legacy applications that do not capture data in one place.

There is an opportunity for businesses to reliably automate their business processes, integrate legacy systems and to provide control around manual processes. The benefit is reduced effort, risk, training and key person risk while increasing the time available for staff to focus on optimizing trading and operational outcomes.

Energy markets require complex gathering, processing & dissemination of data, within tight deadlines.

The Solution

EnergyFlow is a platform that allows energy companies to meet the complex and time-consuming demands of continually evolving 24 x 7 energy markets.

Using the tools in the design console of EnergyFlow, users can define and configure their own operational, trading, reporting or integration workflows. This allows automation and simplification of the most complex trade and operational processes for gas, electricity and carbon markets. Processes definitions are centralized allowing controlled and reactive response to change.

Ready made templates for typical business processes carried out in energy including nominations, settlements and bid/offer preparation
User design console allowing your staff or EOL or its partners to define processes, calculations and business rules without coding
Automation of data gathering, cleansing and validation from sources such as in-house systems, market systems, counterparty and broker systems and external data sources
Built in time series database to capture time series data such as pool prices and demands, nominated, scheduled and actual energy data, weather data and plant data
Built in algorithmic language – tightly integrated to the time series database to allow user configuration of mathematical, statistical and logical calculations for use by automated processes
Built in adapters for regularly used interfacing technologies including web services, web sites, databases, email and document formats including JSON, XML, CSV, HTML, plain text and Excel
Full audit trail for design changes and process execution providing transparency and tracking of business activities

Overview

Applications

EnergyFlow is highly flexible and can be applied to a large variety of energy industry problems including:

Operational management and settlement of Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs)
A complete market solution for grid connected renewables such as wind and solar farms and battery banks including market compliance, market optimization and PPA settlement
Interfacing to Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) systems to collate complex input data such as meter data, perform complex settlement calculations and send results back to ETRM
Manage the full process of gas operations including gathering and calculating input data, performing balancing and optimization calculations and sending nominations to counterparties or markets
Prepare bids and offers for electricity markets with user defined business rules, using input data from plant, the market and forecasts and interfacing to internal or market dispatch and scheduling systems
Monitoring of market and plant conditions and execution of configurable actions – such as dispatching load shedding or plant start instructions via a variety of channels

Benefits

The benefits of using EnergyFlow for automating energy processes include:

Full configurability for even the most complex transactional process
Risk mitigation
Reduced manual effort
Increased and controlled response to change
Reduced training effort
Reduced compliance cost
Increased process transparency and traceability

Components

EnergyFlow has a component based architecture:

Component

Summary Features

Benefits

Process Designer

Comprehensive and convenient user interface allowing customers to easily create and modify business processes
All changes are subject to role based security and full audit trail of changes
Calculations and logic are defined using natural mathematical and logical notation and functions
Processes are defined using industry standard BPMN 2.0 graphical notation

The design and configuration of processes can be carried out by appropriate staff – business analysts or super users – in a controlled manner
Calculations and logic are defined using clear arithmetical and logic calculations with clear symbols. Staff can readily see and change business calculations. This is much safer than defining calculations in excel and more flexible and transparent than embedding calculations in compiled applications
Process changes can be made without reliance on vendors or technical staff
A full managed change process reduces process risk and increases transparency

Process Executor

Execute processes reliably
Visualise process execution state
Manage alerts, deadlines and exceptions
Supports interactive and batch processing with process initiation by schedule or triggered by external events
Provide customisable user interfaces for data or process interaction where manual intervention is needed

Staff can rely on processes executing reliably as required, with escalation to users as needed
Data and processes are automatically managed by the process and made available as needed to the right people or dependent systems
Operational staff are given interfaces to review or enter data in clear, controlled interfaces giving a positive and simple user experience. Risk, complexity and effort are reduced

System Adapters and Interfaces

Data transfer services using standard protocols including REST Services, FTP, email, JDBC
Data transfer formats including JSON, XML, HTML, Plain Text and Excel

Integrate easily with third party systems including in-house systems, databases and market, broker and counterparty systems
Eliminate manual data re-keying activities reducing risk and effort and replacing laborious manual tasks

Energy Data Models

A time series database for capture of market data including flows, prices and plant data
A trade capture database for interfacing with ETRM systems or providing a complete settlement solution for small trade portfolios
Atomic data (numeric, string, Boolean) for simple data structures

Energy industry is easily captured, processed and visualised within EnergyFlow
The expression language is tightly integrated with the built in data models. This means that calculations on data are defined in a natural and easy way that reduces risk of error and supports rapid solution to requirements and responsiveness to change

External Integration