One of the largest midstream energy companies in the US operates more than 100,000 miles of pipeline spanning most of the lower 48 states. Its right of way crosses hundreds of state, county, and municipal regulatory and taxing authorities, presenting a large scale accounting challenge. However, geospatial data related to actual pipeline locations was inconsistent due to myriad systems of record for initial route planning, permitted, and final/as-built pipeline location. Even small variances in actual vs. reported fixed asset location pose substantial risk to the operator’s tax compliance and created uncertainty around which cost centers assets were actually associated with. In cases where GIS data was missing, the fixed asset cost center defaulted to its headquarters.
The midstream energy company wanted to better understand its current state data management processes related to fixed asset accounting in order to establish best-in-class data stewardship, ensure remittance to the correct taxing authorities, and timely unitize assets within the appropriate cost centers to uplift margins.
The midstream energy company turned to Stonebridge Consulting to conduct its fixed asset accounting data management audit. Supporting the audit with enhanced data discovery and visibility, Stonebridge deployed EnerHub, its energy-specific MDM solution that incorporates Stonebridge’s extensive energy-industry experience and project IP in the forms of pre-built connectors to 50+ commercial databases and software packages as well as pre-built business rules for energy-specific data quality assurance.
EnerHub was temporarily connected with key project data sources, including SAP, ESRI, and a variety of internally developed systems. Close to 50 data quality assessments were configured specific to the pipeline operator’s information landscape to provide rapid insights into areas of improvement. EnerHub also surfaced the aggregated dataset to drive PowerBI data quality dashboards and pain point heatmaps that further informed the fixed asset accounting data audit.
Following its data audit, the midstream energy company gained the insight needed to efficiently undertake a larger scale master data management initiative armed with recommendations from Stonebridge, best practices tailored to the pipeline operator, and implementation roadmap. This includes a well-defined data library and a starting point for assigning publishers and subscribers to the mastered data. Bolstered by this success, the midstream energy company is moving forward with its digital transformation in partnership with Stonebridge who is expected to lead both the master data management process optimization and related MDM solution implementation leveraging its vendor-agnostic software selection process.