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TransCanada

TransCanada is a leader in the responsible development and reliable operation of North American energy infrastructure. Their network consists of more than 36,500 miles of pipeline that taps into virtually all major gas supply basins in North America. TransCanada is one of the North American continent's largest providers of gas storage and related services with approximately 370 billion cubic feet of storage capacity. A growing power producer, TransCanada owns, controls, or is developing approximately 10,900 megawatts of power generation.

In March of 2008, GTN Systems, a division of TransCanada, underwent a major system overhaul for its billing needs. The pipeline business has unique requirements that warrant a fully customized solution for contract tracking, scheduling and credit approval. GTN believed an "off the shelf" package could be effectively used to integrate the more generic billing and invoicing functionality with the custom solution, resulting in a faster development life. They required a system that was dependable, easily customizable to meet the few unique billing requirements, easily deployed and operated at an extremely high level of reliability. With the advice of SSNW, GTN chose to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX as the base platform of the integrated billing solution.

GTN's first concern with a packaged solution was to ensure Dynamics AX could handle the complex rate structure used in calculating invoice amounts for the pipeline. Using Dynamics AX's advanced trade agreements module and customizing the logic used to retrieve the "rate" from the trade agreements table, SSNW was able to implement a solution that handles all the intricacies of the GTN rate structure. Along with this functionality, Dynamics AX was viewed as a great fit for integration with the rest of their .Net custom developed systems. The business has already seen the benefits of using Dynamics AX's existing billing processes and procedures with some minor customizations as opposed to a fully custom developed system. Additionally, instead of the analysis being a wide-open wish list situation, the choice to use AX quickly focused the analysis efforts on using the best practices built into Dynamics AX. GTN also feels that this new system will bring significant savings to the company as it is expected to replace the legacy billing systems used on two other pipelines operated by GTN in the near future. Lastly, Dynamics AX eliminates the need for credits and adjustment as the invoices will be created with the correct amounts and interest calculations which have been problematic in the past will be correct on the invoice as well. There was one other hidden benefit for using AX as a billing solution instead of developing whole new custom billing system.