The ePipeMaster EBB is a web-based communication portal used to manage natural gas customer activity. The feature handles marketer / shipper nominations and scheduling for interstate and intrastate pipelines, local distribution companies, gathering systems, producer/operators, and retail marketers. It services all market participants through password controlled access to business functions and a secure transaction process for inserting data, maintaining records, and retrieving results. In essence, the EBB enables natural gas companies to empower their customers (shippers, marketers, agents) to manage their own nominations, scheduling, confirmations, gas usage, and billing statements.

ePipeMaster’s EBB supports extensive pooling transactions to include pool imbalances and pool to pool trades. It manages storage nominations, park and loan functions, banking, shipper balancing, no-notice transportation, and other complex business practices. The EBB also serves as a communication portal for issuing operational flow orders, curtailment, and any other communication to market participants. The feature offers clients an exceptionally easy to use platform that centralizes communication and serves as the primary touch point between a company and its customers and agent/brokers.

EZhou Int'l designed the ePipeMaster EBB to address FERC Order 636, which mandates that pipelines institute user-friendly EBBs to provide shippers with timely information about available capacity. The solution connects city gate transportation customers and customer agents with nomination screens and EBB functions that are compliant with NAESB 2.0 data sets, and it provides these customer / agents with notification of upstream contract data for comparison with transportation bulletin boards to confirm that supplies are scheduled. The EBB facilitates maintenance of DOI records, posting of forecasted and measured gas, viewing of settlement information, and other transactions suitable for internet display. Portal screens allow drill down access from a higher transaction level to lower levels, for example from pools to customers assigned to the pool.

ePipeMaster's EBB system is designed fully compliant with state and FERC regulation requirement. The public section of the EBB system disclose all public information about pipeline operation, including: Tariff, Capacity, Capacity Release, Gas quality, Posted Imbalance, Posted Storage Balance, Transactional Reports, and so on. The customer activities section allows both business unit user, internal user, and business associate user, external user, log in and then perform their daily business tasks.