Natural Gas
Data Validation and Reconciliation in the Gas Transportation & Distribution Sector
The versatility of Sigmafine and the possibility of an easy configuration and customization can improve how gas networks are made by rendering them more efficient and less costly to maintain, reducing the impact on the environment and increasing profitability.
Sigmafine generates a dataset that is coherent, trustable, and usable to improve the daily operations of the gas network.
Natural gas is forecasted as one of the most important energy sources of the next decades. Being a relatively clean fossil fuel, gas has also potentials to reduce worldwide pollution during the transition period to renewable energy technologies. As gas is so valuable and useful, economies are gradually becoming increasingly more dependent on this natural resource.
With more than 20 years supporting several worldwide companies in the digital transformation process, Sigmafine is currently used in this field by companies operating in gas production, processing, liquefaction, regasification and storage.
Gas Network Balancing
Sigmafine is used daily in refineries with many production units, multiple tank farms, and thousands of flow meters to deliver validated, reconciled, and conditioned data for accurate production accounting.
Meter Management
Identify meter performance issues and correct any imbalances (mass or volume) to minimize measurement errors and provide more accurate flow rate estimates.
Composition Tracking
Up-to-date estimates of materials stocked in inventories or fed to process units. Estimates can be calculated daily or even hourly, empowering operations teams to fix production deviations quickly.
Quality Tracking
Allow users to balance processes where a mass balance is not enough to determine the amounts of concentrated and purified components.
Energy Management
Accurately monitoring energy-intensive equipment is critical to improving usage and decreasing emissions.
Compliance
A single source of truth, allowing users to automatically transfer data to business systems and databases.
Improved Asset Monitoring
Sigmafine gives you a better insight to estimate, monitor, and control site losses
Complex Production Allocation Management
Allocating volume and energy according to even the most complicated ownership structures.
Supported Applications
- Gas Production
- Gas Processing
- Gas Storage
- LNG Liquefaction
- LNG Regasification
- LNG Storage
- Transmission Pipelines
- City Gate station
- Distribution Pipelines
Integrating Sigmafine with SAP
Sigmafine comes with an integration framework component, allowing data to interface with external systems, including SAP. The most common SAP modules integrated with Sigmafine are:
- PPPI: Post reconciled figures of productions, consumptions, and losses compared with planned/business figures
- SD: Download inbound raw material receipts and outbound final product shipments from SAP
- WM/MM: Align physical or logical SAP inventories with Sigmafine inventories
The Benefits of Improved Data Quality
Improved data quality in the gas transportation and distribution industry is primarily associated with:
- Validating and automating production accounting
- Validating auditable estimates of raw materials, intermediates, and product inventories
- Validating KPIs for improved process control and system optimization
The Business Impact of Implementing Sigmafine
Customers who have implemented Sigmafine have achieved:
- Daily production accounting automation
- Equipment & site-wide performance monitoring
- Loss monitoring
- Results distribution throughout the organization
- Improved production planning and logistics
On top of delivering these benefits that drive operational excellence, it’s been estimated that Sigmafine has a payback period of less than 6 months – a critical value proposition for customers who are tightening resources to stay competitive.
Resources
Natural Gas
Data Validation and Reconciliation in the Gas Transportation & Distribution Sector
The versatility of Sigmafine and the possibility of an easy configuration and customization can improve how gas networks are made by rendering them more efficient and less costly to maintain, reducing the impact on the environment and increasing profitability.
Marco Lanteri
Industry Principal for Gas Transportation and Distribution
Pimsoft, S.p.A.
Milan