The Business Associates Module of ePipeMaster serves as the system’s Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and saves all information pertaining to customers, vendors, and virtually anyone the business unit conducts business with. The CRM provides a gateway to ePipeMaster’s Contract Modules and then all other business modules, which support daily and monthly business transactions.
The software supports a range of business relationships such as wholesale, gas supply, retail marketers, transportation and agent/marketer customer pools (residential and commercial customers), other transporters, operators, and any other related business partners.
Data security is ePipeMaster's first priority concern. We understand the necessity to keep the data separated for each business associate/shipper. Inside ePipeMaster, users are separated into two major groups. Group one is for users that come from business unit or transporter. This kind of user is called internal user also. Another group is for users that come from business unit's clients, business associates or shippers. This group of user is called external user. Our business associate/shipper based data set control makes sure a shipper's sensitive business data is only accessible by authorized internal user or by authorized external user from that shipper or its agents. ePipeMaster provides full support for authorized external user to grant a variety of agencies to another business associate. This shipper level data set security control is fully compliant with state and FERC regulation requirement.
External users are categorized into group-assigned roles so that system access for each user is authorized by business unit and each business associate. Examples of roles include: Contract Administration, Contract View, Capacity Release Administrator/View, Confirmation Administrator/View, Billing Administrator/View, and more.
An Agency is an agreement between two Business Associates (BA) or Shippers or Service Requestors that have ePipeMaster access to the same business unit where one party delegates specific roles to the other to transact business on its behalf. Agencies are granted at the role level (i.e. Submit Nominations, View Nominations, etc.), are date effective, can be contract or location specific, or in some instances, be global. Users can create/modify/delete and view their own agency relationships in ePipeMaster.