Plant Accounting Case Study

North Texas service provider relies on W Energy to manage gathering and gas processing at scale with a lean team, accelerate plant settlement, simplify producer statements, and easily configure complex contracts to keep pace with operational needs
and acquisitions.

Moving to W Energy’s cloud plant accounting solution enabled us to operate with a leaner team. The service has been excellent and very valuable, everything we hoped for.

• Plant Processing
• Gathering
• Contract Management
• Division Order
• CAW (Customer Activity Website)

Operating in major basins across North America, a leading midstream transportation provider operates a large truck fleet that moves more than 1,000 loads of produced water, propane, and other natural gas liquids (NGL) each month. Like many carriers, it relied on manual dispatch and phone based communications, requiring full time back office staff to manage driver assignments and communicate status updates with customers.

Seeking to further optimize its extensive trucking operations, the service provider’s management team wanted to leverage corporate data more effectively in order to better analyze driver utilization and productivity. The company wanted to see how many drivers are working at any given moment, productive or nonproductive hours of service, and revenue generation by driver.

The service provider relies on a network of third party carriers; however, the associated fees and costs were not centrally tracked preventing a clear and current view of accrued expenses. To better understand spending and project cash flow, it wanted to capture all transportation events – including disposal fees, demurrage, and third-party hauling time – in order to calculate total, landed cost for each transaction, reconcile, and expedite invoicing.

Paper-based and manual processes in the field impeded current and accurate revenue forecasting, including physical bills of lading for each shipment. The service provider wanted to accurately estimate revenue by capturing field tickets and bills of lading electronically in order to automate transactions, accelerate accounts receivable invoicing, and optimize cash flow.

The North Texas service provider wanted to modernize its entire software portfolio and run 100% of its back-office operations on the cloud. After evaluating the capabilities and costs of maintaining its current legacy software, the company selected W Energy’s cloud-based plant accounting solution, which provides unprecedented flexibility to reconfigure contracts within the software to better support the workflow requirements of the service provider.

Leveraging W Energy’s cloud-based high performance computing, the service provider accelerates allocations and other complex processes, enabling it to reliably settle plants from measurement to AP/AR in 10 minutes. Plus, it completely eliminates manual spreadsheet workarounds and builds confidence in financial results.

The service provider quickly customized out-of-the-box gas statements and continues to receive positive feedback from producers on the high quality statements. It uses W Energy’s Division Order module, which simplifies the payment process for each meter and contract and makes it easier to manage suspense items.

The solution also includes a Customer Activity Website that enables third party shippers to easily manage delivery-side nominations, which is used to confirm daily volumes with downstream pipelines.

A decisive factor in the North Texas service provider’s selection of W Energy is its reputation (validated by multiple peers and references) for customer service and partnering with customers to ensure business results. Through its technology partnership with W Energy, the service provider reports that it has the right solutions to operate at scale with a lean team and the right support to sustain its best-in-class operations.

Since implementing W Energy, the service provider has expanded its North Texas system with additional gathering and processing capacity through a bolt on acquisition. W Energy gives the midstream service provider confidence that it can onboard even the largest acquisition and easily keep pace with contract changes.

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