enTrader logistics overview

enTrader Logistics is Contigo’s powerful and scalable physical fuel logistics platform. It manages the movement, delivery, storage and consumption of any physical fuel used in energy generation as well as other materials used in the energy generation process such as minerals and chemicals. Additionally, the re-use, sale and disposal of all generation by-products such as the High Carbon Ash, Bottom Ash and Fly ash can also be managed through its comprehensive capabilities.

enTrader Logistics is currently being used manage the supply chain for Europe’s largest coal, co-fired (coal and Bio-solid) and pure burn bio-solid power stations. It rich and flexible capabilities allow it to manage the complexities of all physical commodities from Coal, Oil, BioFuels and Bio-solids, Limestone, Gypsum, Ash-byproducts and more with ease.

Built as an licenced module to the core enTrader system, the highly scalable enTrader product ensures that it delivers the flexibility required by traditional power generating companies and also those that are transitioning from the use of bulk fossil fuels delivered via ship, barge and rail through to increasing use of sustainable fuels such as Bio-solids and Bio-fuels delivered via road with far more complex logistics and storage requirements due to the necessity to control both the certification and fuel quality, such as moisture, throughout the supply chain.

enTrader provides a powerful forecast scheduling component for managing the movement of fuels by road, pipe, rail and ship. Complex movement scenarios can be modelled and tested ensuring the right fuels are delivered at the right molecular quality to the right generation locations, to meet the forward generation and emissions requirements. Forecast Movement scenarios can be easily converted into Stock Transactions which deal with the actual movement of the fuel through the supply chain. Wizard screens, a wealth of standard reports and a flexible order entry capability ensures that notification of hauliers of the forward schedule for actual fuel movements is a rapid and easy process.

Comprehensive Trade Capture Capabilities

The core enTrader product captures all trades associated with the supply of fuels from the fuel purchase trades, international and national freight and storage contracts, services contracts and sales trades associated for generation by products or surplus fuels.

All forecast and actual costs associated with the trading, movement and storage of physical fuels are captured within enTrader allowing rich reporting of the actual total fuel supply cost incurred to date and the future forecast fuel supply costs. This provides comprehensive financial management information to effectively manage portfolio risk.

Settlement from Mine or Farm to Station

The core enTrader product manages the settlement of all trades (fuel, logistics and service) within the system and can use complex formula based settlement for fuels based on the delivered molecular qualities with the ability to automatically calculate quality price adjustments where the supplied fuels fall outside contractual levels.

enTrader’s highly configurable settlement capability can be used by the Back Office team to quickly and easily produce invoices / credits and delivers a significant reduction in operation risk through a systemised, single solution to the settlement problem using enTrader’s Straight Through Processing (STP) capabilities, flexible workflows and comprehensive auditing of data changes.

Managing the value chain at the lowest granularity

Trades for the purchase, sale and disposal of physical fuels, aggregates, minerals, chemicals and generation by-products such as ash, can all be captured in the core enTrader product. The enTrader Logistics module allows high-level scenario forecast planning of Stock Movements through the supply chain and into onsite generation bunkers and stock locations based on financial and/or molecular quality requirements for particular generation units / business units.

Fuel Stock Accounting

Physical fuel location stock levels and their molecular fuel qualities and the “financial cost of supply” for the entire fuel supply chain are calculated within enTrader’s Fuel Stock Accounting (FSA) module based on the Stock Transactions captured within enTrader Logistics.

Management Information Reporting

Extensive “Data Mining” opportunities exist through enTrader’s rich Position Management capability which can be used to create a range of dynamic real-time positions, split by data entities such as book, counterparty or commodity and based on the scheduled and received Stock Transactions to monitor the fuel supply chain. These positions can be aggregated, and charted within enTrader or exported to Excel to provide a rich “User Decision Support” capability.

Additionally, an extensive suite of logistics and finance reports ship out of the box to track stock transactions volume and value and associated sampled molecular qualities through the supply chain from source to station and beyond.

Built in Asset Management and Monitoring

Asset Management and monitoring is a key requirement for a logistics system and enTrader Logistics ships with a number of features to assist the asset managers. Minimum and maximum molecular fuel quality constraints can be created for each Power Station in the fleet. Any attempt to create deliveries of fuels that would breach these limits results in alerts being raised by SMS and/or Email to alert the asset managers.

A multitude of client-focused extensibility points

The enTrader Logistics solution has been designed from the ground up to allow users to extend the capabilities of the system. Unlike many other vendors solutions, adding new Commodities, new supply chain or generation locations, new products, new fuel quality attributes (molecular qualities etc) and a wealth of other data content is easily achievable by end users of the system via the rich user interface.

Scalable high performance architecture

enTrader Logistics enTrader is a web based application that has been engineered from the ground up, using the latest Microsoft and Oracle technologies and “best practice development techniques” to deliver consistently high performance and “future-proof” scalability. It is equally well suited to single power station implementations, such as co-fired Gas and Renewables CHP plant with modest fuel supply chain complexity through to multi port / transport method / power station / commodity / country installations with highly specialised and complex supply chains involving the management of millions of tonnes of fuel from source through generation consumption per year.

Fail safe operational risk management via a comprehensive Security and Audit model

enTrader provides a comprehensive role and permission based security system allowing fine-grained roles to be defined to meet all security policies. All actions in the system are audited so changes within the system are easily tracked and reported on.

Fast Implementation, early ROI

enTrader can be implemented to work “out of the box” but can also be easily configured as required by particular clients. The majority of configuration can be done through the application without the need for expensive consultants. Interfaces, plug-ins, reports and alerts can be built and easily integrated by either Contigo or the client’s IT team.

Additional details

More details can be found on the additional licenced modules that are available for the core enTrader product by clicking on the images below.