Insights
Contigo speaks to CTRM Center: Recruitment, revenue and enFlow process automation tool enhancements
April 7th 2021
Nikki Harris
enFlow
enFlow is a business process automation and optimisation tool dedicated to the needs of the energy industry. It has been specifically designed to support day-to-day functions for electricity, gas and carbon trading, including operations, reporting and settlements.
enFlow is an essential tool for businesses looking to increase agility and productivity.
In a competitive, fast-paced energy market, businesses need to increase productivity, reduce cost and eliminate risk. To remain ahead of the competition and take advantage of market opportunities, smart, effective decisions need to be made rapidly.
enFlow is a process automation tool designed to swiftly provide critical data needed to support decision-making and to automate laborious and complex processes, from basic reading of emails to intelligent optimisations and evaluations. enFlow enables businesses to free up human talent to be used more effectively.
Supportive
enFlow is a purpose-built automation solution designed to improve productivity, reduce workload and business risk, simplify workflows and improve integration across systems.
It can automate processes such as PPAs, energy bid preparations, nominations, settlement of complex trades including PPAs, bid and offer preparation, market compliance monitoring, management of certificates and much more.
Configurable
enFlow is easy to use and configurable to the specific needs of a business or operation. It can be configured in-house without coding, enabling users to support bespoke business, trading or reporting workflows.
Businesses can simplify the most complex operational processes for gas, electricity and renewable markets, wholesale, generation or retail. Processes execute automatically, meaning businesses can focus on what is most important.
Connected
enFlow provides many options to work with counterparties and enables direct integration with trading and operation software solutions, such as Energy Trading Risk Management (ETRM) products, pricing engines and notification tools. It can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise.
Flexible
enFlow supports the business processes involved in the daily operations of an energy portfolio, from simple processes to complex calculations.
Typical uses for enFlow include:
- Managing Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) – such as validating operating schedules against contractual limits
- Managing settlement of PPAs and similar contracts
- Extending the settlements capabilities of ETRMs for complex trades by retrieving trade details, performing settlements calculations and exporting results back
- Executing complex calculations such as those used in forecasting and valuation
- TSO nominations for capacity and storage
- Managing certificate inventory and registry transactions
- Decomposition of shape profiles into standard tradeable blocks and importing into an ETRM
- Retrieving the latest credit ratings, pricing data and other critical decision-making data and import directly to your ETRM
Features of our process automation tool
- Ready-made templates for operational processes including nominations, bid preparation and settlements.
- User design console with easy to configure design tools
- Automation of information gathering required for market decision-making from a variety of sources, including in-house systems, market systems, counterparty systems, weather, brokers and more
- Built-in algorithmic tools to allow user configuration of analytical and settlement calculations
- Configurable data submission utility for B2B interactions
- Full audit trail of records, data, acknowledgements supporting settlement and compliance
- Time series database tightly integrated to the system calculation engine and reporting capabilities
- Full integration with Contigo’s ETRM system enTrader and nomination and scheduling tool enVoy
Examples of enFlow in action
Automation of physical market interactions for solar and wind farms
The operation of solar and wind farms must be continually monitored for compliance and economic conditions. For example, in Australia, due to the increased penetration of renewables, there can often be extended periods of negative pool prices, in which case it usually makes economic sense to decrease generation. With enFlow, a business can monitor for current and scheduled negative price periods and automatically send signals to plant control systems to decrease generation according to user-configured business rules.
Optimisation and automation of gas operations
For both gas system operators (transmission system operators) and gas market participants, the daily tasks of gathering data, balancing, nominating, scheduling and reconciling gas across pipelines, storage assets and contracts is data-intensive, complex and involves interactions with multiple systems. enFlow is the ideal tool for both gathering and disseminating data and for automatically executing user-defined business rules for portfolio operation and optimization.
Automation of interactions with ETRM and energy nomination systems
There are many ETRMs and nomination/scheduling systems in the market. Many of these systems provide an API or toolkit allowing for extension or automation of the product operation. Automation using these APIs is typically defined using scripting languages such as Python. enFlow provides a compelling alternative to scripting, by allowing automations to be defined graphically via a drag and drop interface. As such, business analysts can very quickly and clearly implement required automations. This can reduce solution turnaround times and increase responsiveness to change.
Contigo’s sophisticated energy suite is offered as a fully managed service in the cloud.
Our managed service offers a host of benefits, including regular updates and ongoing software support, combined with infrastructure management.
