Leading performance improvement company for the energy industry launches a study to help facilities identify opportunities for improving processes and increasing profit margins.

Dallas, TEXAS – July 13, 2016 – HSB Solomon Associates, LLC (Solomon), the leading performance improvement company for the global energy industry, announced today the launch of its Worldwide Natural Gas Transmission System Performance Analysis (Natural Gas Transmission Study) for operating year 2016.

The Natural Gas Transmission Study is designed to help natural gas transmission system operators improve performance in a sustainable manner. The study provides in-depth analysis of top opportunities and estimates of potential cost optimization relative to best performers and selected peer groups. Performance is assessed across the following areas: maintenance costs and equipment utilization, pipeline integrity and inspection practices, and personnel effectiveness and reliability of compression.

“In today’s competitive market with near-zero tolerance for environmental impacts, it is critical to maintain pipeline integrity while improving cost performance," said Richard Harper, Product Manager for the Natural Gas Transmission Study. "Operators need to understand how to determine the best performance for both financial and operational optimization.”

The Natural Gas Transmission Study can help operators:

  • Determine competitive positions using both standard and custom industry peer groups.
  • Assess specific performance shortfalls relative to customized peer groups.
  • Formulate expense and margin optimization plans to close opportunity gaps.
  • Establish performance targets and measure progress.
  • Demonstrate performance and capability to joint-venture partners, financial institutions, and security analysts.
  • Access key performance indicators (KPIs) for analyzing performance.
  • Compare current performance to past studies, or establish base-year data for future trend analysis.
  • Use gap analysis to compare performance to peer groups and top performers.
  • Compare systems with diverse operating configurations, system sizes, terrains, power ratings, products, and complexities.
  • Compare performance at the pipeline-system level.
  • Make comparisons across geographic regions.

Extensive information is collected across all major facets of an operation, with clients reporting data leading to 300 metrics per transmission system. Solomon analyzes operating data using three divisors: volume-length, diameter-length, and, more significantly,  Equivalent Pipeline Complexity (EPC™). Relying on the competitive divisors of volume or volume-length is no longer enough to give an accurate insight into pipeline operations. At Solomon, our benchmarking methodology takes into account operational complexities. It then gives a true picture of how successfully operators are implementing best practices compared to their competition and where opportunities exist to make positive margin improvements/