Delivery and development of regulated services

In 2020, the integration process through which the commercial management activities of the three businesses – transportation, storage and regasification – merged into a single organisation continued, allowing the optimisation of the processes within Snam. In particular, the creation of a single Commercial Control Room to manage daily movements and deliveries of gas and network balancing has led to improved performance, by integrating know-how from various sectors.

Commercial Control Room: integrating client services

One of the main responsibilities of the Control Room, which works 24/7 to monitor the Italian gas system, is balancing the system, with a dual valence: physical and commercial.

Commercial balancing consists of the activities required to correctly schedule, account for and allocate the transported gas, as well as the fee system that encourages customers to maintain a balance between the volumes they inject into and withdraw from the network. Every day, Snam receives transportation and storage capacity requests from its clients. In confirming the requests, the Control Room complies with, among other things, the specific informational requirements established under the Balancing Network Code (Regulation EU 312/2014), specifically hourly publication on the Snam website of information on system balancing status, as well as the publication of information on withdrawals measured during the gas day, twice per day for each shipper. This means clients receive information able to allow them to evaluate their own status and, if necessary, implement actions to balance their position.

On the other hand, the physical balancing of the system consists of the set of operations through which the Dispatching department of Snam controls flow parameters (capacity and pressure) in real time in order to ensure that gas can move safely and efficiently from injection points to withdrawal points at all times.

As occurred for the entire commercial area, the activities carried out by the Control Room have been reorganised to allow for remote management, thereby ensuring necessary business continuity and the fundamental safety of people in the face of the Covid-19 emergency.

Similarly, Dispatching, which represents the central hub of the national gas transportation network, unable to stop for any reason, worked in isolation during the emergency, providing an example of resilience and becoming an international best practice adopted by the National Grid, ALNG and Transitgas.

Flexibility and Default Services

To support improved operational flexibility in the Italian gas system, the possibility of reserving transportation capacity on a monthly and daily basis was introduced, in addition to an annual basis, through redelivery points which supply gas directly to thermoelectric power stations, paying solely for the amounts reserved and not for an entire thermal year of the service. This access method creates more flexible allocation methods to promptly and efficiently deal with new operating conditions on the electric system.

Again for thermal year 2020-21, Snam Rete Gas serves as the Default Transportation Supplier for the Sales Companies and End Users under their network for which the balancing user responsible for the relative withdrawals cannot be identified. The same service is also carried out for the sales companies and final customers at third-party transporters who explicitly requested it. The service in the 2019-2020 thermal year involved 270 parties amongst Final Customers and Sales Companies, for volumes of approximately 240,000 MWh.

In 2020, allocations for storage capacities, similar to the transportation business, were incorporated in the European PRISMA platform. This synergy assists clients who make use of a single platform to reserve transportation and storage capacity, making Snam’s storage capacity more transparent at the European level. Thanks to Snam’s continued commitment to meeting the various needs of clients, flexibility of the services offered is guaranteed and constant and accurate information is provided, thanks to dedicated studies.

Informational Systems Serving Clients

The Company makes an information channel available to its clients, to support prompt and flexible communication, making it possible to obtain “smart” information based on individual requirements, as well as offering direct and informal “chat” communication. Further, the portal offers clients a system of widgets and notifications which can be personalised.

In particular, as of 22 May 2019 Snam has offered its clients the Jarvis commercial platform, with a new user experience co-designed with market operators and intended to establish a new service model offered to clients by the company, with integrated business processes. This project, which saw the addition of new functions in 2020, was created using the Agile development methodology, based on streamlined business processes integrated into a single multi-language system using innovative architecture that covers processes currently distributed among 17 systems.

These activities led to a definitive switch to the new Jarvis platform (for the functions released), with progressive elimination of functions previously found on other various systems. In particular, in December 2020 the applications PSV and Portale M were definitively shut down.

Additionally, in 2020 a Customer Relationship Management system was added to the Jarvis Project to support the transition from operational excellence to commercial excellence, with the aim of improving the quality of services offered and customer relations, ever more important in company strategies.