The trend for the gas market is obvious: in addition to the present requirements of a modern communication infrastructure the future communication between gas suppliers has to be carried out in legal regulations. For many companies this means restructuring their IT-infrastructure, because the new huge emergence of messages can only be met with a consistent use of standards for the communication of data and an involved optimized automation of processes. The need to comply with the legal requirements is also a chance to update own business processes in order to be competitive in the future deregulated energy market.

The inubit BPM-Suite – an integrated communication platform for legally compliant data exchange 

To automate complex business processes in the gas market on the long run, inubit offers with the inubit BPM-Suite an integrated communication platform for exchanging all necessary business messages, incl. ready-made, preconfigured process templates.

In doing so all ways of communication (especially EDIINT AS2, e-mail, FTP) and data formats (EDIG@S, EDIFACT, XML, Excel, CSV) externally as well as internally are supported. Interfaces regarding internal applications have thereby a central importance because every automated communication only works if the data can be directly fed in from the backend systems into the processes.

But today most of the companies do not have implemented an integrated, homogeneous infrastructure. Many systems consist of single monolithic applications which are connected with proprietary interfaces. The result is the extensive maintenance of the interfaces as well as performance problems of the system landscape. Furthermore the system landscape possesses numerous widely spread log-files which prevents an accurate monitoring of the processes. Moreover employees are hardly involved adequately in the process flow.

When facing the new regulatory challenges, which will have considerable consequences on the business processes, gas suppliers may use this opportunity to examine their processes thoroughly. For this the actual processes can be defined in the inubit Suite, comprising the application-comprehensive data interchange, the involved employees as well as the communication with the business partners. The technical implementation of this „Target-Process-Concept“ will be carried out via a completely graphical con-figuration in so called „Technical Workflows“, in which all industry-specific communication formats and protocols are available via standard modules and all relevant IT-systems can be integrated with the help of standard connectors „out-of-the-box“. Thus, the inubit BPM-Suite simplifies the work of companies in the deregulated gas market noticeably and provides barrier-free business operations.

Thanks to the open, integrated and modern architecture, the inubit BPM-Suite is one of the leading products for the management of business processes, for the integration of systems and the optimization of the B2B communication. As a center for their business processes the inubit Suite manages data correctly and enables the companies to gain real-time information over processes, to keep an overview at any time and to improve the operational business continuously.  

EDIG@S – it is not antiquated

Several years ago the gas industry created the EDIG@S standard to endeavor the automation of the data communication. This message format, prevailing in version 3.2, is based on the worldwide established UN / EDIFACT standard and meets the concerns of the gas industry specifications. Due to the exact defined structure and the close regulations of the contents EDIG@S is excellently applicable for the automated communication between partners in the gas market.

Due to these advantages inubit has developed one of the most efficient and flexible EDIG@S-solutions. The inubit solution contains EDIG@S in every version and will also support completely the, for this year announced, EDIG@S-version 4.0. Moreover the inubit solution offers the processing of further relevant message structures like Excel (KISS-A), XML and CSV as well as all communication protocols e.g. FTP, AS2, OFTP and X.400.