Pharos Enterprise Intelligence

We have an exciting new feature, in our desire to provide advanced settlements support within the Asset Management System, we now allow the ability to "power" search within the contents of all MIS files in Pharos AMS and Pharos Trader.

Pharos has always provided the ability to search for a specific file by its name, date and version. Now you can refine your search further by searching for a string or pattern of numbers in the file contents with our wildcard and regular expression searches! In the search results, you'll see the names of files that contain matching values, and all matching lines within each file.

For instance, if you know you had a recent NCPC rebill for $534,363.45 sometime in the month of May, you can ask Pharos to search for that exact value in the month of May only within NCPC files. Pharos will quickly find the file you're looking for. If you're not sure of the exact value, but know it was between $500,000 and $600,000, then instead you could search for the regular expression pattern: ",[5]\d\d\d\d\d.". Typically only software developers have the tools to perform regular expression searching. We have brought that capability to you.

Managing information and knowledge is an important role within an organization. Let's define some terminology. Information management is managing the process of acquiring, analyzing, disseminating, and owning information. Knowledge management is the how you record, retain, and disseminate knowledge. Knowledge is the application of information.

In managing information is it critical to have an information owner. The owner has access to the information, knows how to interpret the information and most importantly is the one to sign off on the information's use. It is not uncommon for someone to have access to information from which they run an analysis with wrong assumptions. The information could be incomplete or inappropriate. It is important for people within the organization confer with the appropriate information manager before they set out to perform an analysis. It may sound bureaucratic but it can lead to preventing costly mistakes.

In the context of the commercial operations of a power company we can divide information into different time horizons. The past, the present and the future. Examples of the past information is your settlements data and performance data. The present is your real time business intelligence such as what is my power plant doing now and what is happening in the marketplace. The future are your forecasts, forward curves and budgets.

Our tagline is "Perfecting Commercial Operations." That's a pretty bold statement. What do we mean?

In the way we view a commercial operations team we see there being several key functions that have to work seamlessly together. There are the asset managers who market the power and procure the fuel. There is settlements who reviews and analyses the financial performance of the assets and provides feedback to the asset managers. There is regulatory who keeps the asset managers informed of market changes and lobbies on behalf of the company. Lastly there are commercial analysts who support all of the groups by diving into the details, developing the models, analyzing the risks and opportunities. Commercial analytics has to be multidisciplinary and have a good understanding of the other group's processes. It is in our view that it is the glue that ties the commercial team together.

Information Management

Managing information is critical to any commercial operation. It is also important to know what data you have access to, where it is located, how to access, how to interpret that data and then ultimately filter and deliver the needed information. A power company has access to thousands of different data points. Typically they only use a very small subset of that data and don't spend the time integrating it with separate but related pieces. Marginal improvements in managing data can result in very large improvements in operations. Performing good analysis begins with managing information well. At least one person within your organization should be dubbed the information czar. It is their responsibility to at least know what information you have access to, where it is located and how to interpret. That person can then explain to others. Read our other post on Information and Knowledge Management.

Spreadsheet applications are a tough program to beat. Little compares to the ease of use and the flexibility a spreadsheet provides. It is the place to start when performing an analysis, to prototype an idea or create an engine to convert data into useful information. Yet all too often I see spreadsheets designed in a way that hinder their usefulness. I am trying to be generic when I say spreadsheet application. The gold standard is Microsoft Excel for Windows—perhaps the one application Microsoft gets right. It is perhaps the one reason I run Windows virtually on my Mac. There are other applications out there. One that I am starting to adopt is the free OpenOffice Calc.

I believe there is an art and science to building spreadsheets. There is also a science in how spreadsheets should be deployed in the enterprise.

Below I will highlight the following:

Spreadsheet design:

• It should be easy and intuitive to add information.
• Manual input should be centralized to specific places
• Automated data feeds should be centralized to specific places
• Calculations should be laid out clearly
• There should be a limit to what is hard coded in formulas and macros
• Should be easy for someone to look at your spreadsheet and see how it functions
• Design spreadsheets for easy data mining and for use as a database
• Make the spreadsheet non-programmer friendly

Spreadsheet in the enterprise

• Its ok for spreadsheets to be used in the enterprise
• Treat spreadsheets as engines taking raw data and formatting the data for use somewhere else.

The Pharos Art of the Spreadsheet

We have two exciting announcements to share with you. We now support the NYISO in Pharos AMS and we have started a new product line called Pharos Trader.

Pharos AMS for NYISO - Over the last few weeks we have released an alpha version of the Pharos AMS for NYISO. We are capturing public and private data from the NYISO portals and presenting rich, detailed content. One of the many elements we are very excited about is that Pharos AMS for NYISO provides users a NYISO version of the bid visualization tool. With this tool you can view all versions of every bid submitted, accepted, rejected, modified, and bid verification passed or failed. You can then overlay your unit's dispatch over this data. Pharos AMS for NYISO is able to capture all versions of a bid over time and allows you to visualize how your bids are being modified no matter how frequently changes occur. To that extent, we have captured up to 12 different versions of a bid within a single hour. This provides a detailed and robust audit trail of your bids never before attainable in the industry.

Pharos Trader - Pharos Trader is similar to Pharos AMS, but with a sharp focus on the needs of energy traders. It is designed specifically for trading clients who may not have significant IT resources, yet want a high-end customizable solution for archiving and analyzing power market data and financial information. Implementation takes minutes once ISO credentials have been issued.

We are expanding our Alpha Program to both Pharos AMS for NYISO and Pharos Trader. If you are interested in participating or know someone who would be interested please email us at info@pharos-ei.com.

Over the past week and a half we have rolled out some exciting new ISO-NE content for Pharos AMS. Our goal is to provide a set of tools to quickly answer questions about operations, streamline workflows, and provide real time analysis.

For example, we are making it easy to answer common questions like "What happened overnight/during the last few hours?" "When did the unit hit the line?" "Were the units loaded up or sitting at min?"

Our Unit Operations Report allows you to visually see a complete set of unit attributes such as generation, DDP, EMax, Reg High, Reg Low, real time price, ramp rate, and unit control mode. It's very easy to see how the units operated up to a seven day period. Putting the cursor in the graph will show all values along the y-axis for that time. Charts can be zoomed for greater detail, and all data can be viewed in tabular format as well.

What about financial impact? How well did the units perform on a revenue basis or the INCs and DECs? We have the Hourly Energy Revenue Estimate Report and the INC/DEC Summary Estimate Report to provide a revenue estimate right up to the previous hour.

Finding out the day ahead schedule is equally easy. Our DAM, INC/DEC and Forecast report shows the day ahead award for the day for both energy and INCs and DECS, and also includes the forecast for reoffer that the ISO posts at approximately 22:00.

Bidding strategy begins with a good understanding of the market and how your assets interact with the market. It is a process of continual refinement. Our Bid Visualizer is a powerful tool for assessing bidding performance. Here we draw the entire bid curve including the no-load when economically scheduled. On the curve we plot the day ahead schedule and real time DDP and price. It provides an easy way to assess how the ISO is dispatching the unit. The result can provide insight into how to tweak the bid curve for improved financial performance. Over the next few weeks look for enhancements that provide more information about operations and better analytics.

Bidding errors have the potential to be costly, and checking bids can be a time consuming process. Pharos AMS streamlines that process with the (Pre-)Market Offer Viewer. It provides a comprehensive view of all offers and operational parameters. The user has the ability to request all supporting data at a click of a button. After tweaking bids in eMarket the user can immediately go into the Pharos AMS and grab all data and display it on one simple screen. Checking all the components in eMarket would require walking through multiple screens. For added piece of mind data is timestamped at the time of download so you know it is the most current data.

We have added two email lists. One that alerts the day ahead award result that is published at 4:05pm EST and another at approximately 10pm EST that publishes the DAM award along with the 22:00 forecast report. Users may subscribe themselves to email lists by selecting 'Edit Account' under the 'Logged In' menu.

In the next few weeks we will be perfecting some of these reports with more content and analysis. We will also be working on market intelligence reports to help provide insight into what is happening in the market.

As always, if you'd like to comment or suggest a feature, or if you see any issues, send us an email at info@pharos-ei.com.

Things have been quiet here on the Pharos blog for the last month, but we've been incredibly busy behind the scenes. Not only have we continued to work on Pharos AMS, but the really big news is that we went live with our first ISO-NE alpha customer last week. Woo hoo!

(You can read the story about "going live" and learn more about our Alpha program below the break.)

We recently came across a blog article in InformationWeek's CIO Weblog that pretty much shares our view of the future of IT. It is titled "8 Trends In IT CIOs Can't Ignore." (http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/05/8_trends_in_it...)