Q&A with Matt Barrett: Gas Shipping Platform
We recently caught up with Matt Barrett, Software Engineering Team Leader C# who shared insights on the Procode Gas Shipping Platform, and what sets it apart from the competition. Read on to find out more…
What is a Gas Shipping Platform?
The Gas Shipping Platform is a solution that helps gas shippers fulfil their industry obligations and those of their clients – gas suppliers. This can range from reports indicating performance against set targets to forecasting demand against a portfolio to enable accurate nominations and routing of files to relevant suppliers.
How does a Gas Shipping Platform work?
Built on a host of Azure services to enable scalability, the platform acts as an information exchange service between shippers, suppliers, and other industry bodies. The data being transferred is validated and routed to the required tenant, before ensuring key information is extracted to build up and maintain a portfolio for each shipper/supplier, which in turn is used to produce insightful reporting functionality available on a web-based UI – plus much more!
How does a Gas Shipping Platform benefit companies looking to start shipping for themselves?
As a self-shipper, there are many industry metrics to be measured and reported against, demand to be forecasted to ensure accurate trading, files/flows to be routed onwards to suppliers and much more. Having a gas shipping platform in place removes this overhead, providing digestible reports and insights into the portfolio as well as configurable demand forecasting to reflect growth targets or different weather patterns. Ultimately a platform like this helps the shipper make informed decisions and stay on top of their obligations.
In your opinion what level of scalability should tech platforms offer to accommodate the growing gas shipping demands?
Given the ability of gas shippers to take on multiple suppliers, it’s very important for any viable gas shipping system to have the ability to scale to accommodate a massive amount of growth in a short period of time. Equally, the system needs to be efficient and only scale to an appropriate size at any given time to ensure the cost to serve is reduced.
How is Procode’s Gas Shipping Platform different from its competitors?
The Gas Shipping platform utilises the Azure tech stack, making it possible to scale the system massively when required – this makes it possible for the system to cater for a range of portfolio sizes. Another key function of the platform is the ability to split shipper level files between multiple suppliers. Invoice files, for example, can be broken down and shipper level charges split between suppliers based on their usage within the LDZ, EUC and War band grouping the charge is associated to.