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GSES
Background of the Metis platform
During the last 2 decades of implementing HCA solutions globally, we realised that most HCA solutions look like enhanced spreadsheet engines: designed for basic lookups, simple logic and some reporting. In itself that was not an issue. Most of the assets were pretty straight-forward, steady production, predictable nomination regimes and an offtake profile that is often the same as last month’s. But we also see the world is changing: the steady ‘take as produced’ operations are in decline. We see an increase in complexity, a drive for optimisation and a bigger focus on joint developments. On top of that: ever increasing market forces demanding change and uncertainties the energy industry must cope with, leading to the necessity to adopt change faster.
Over the last years we started to realise more and more that the adoption of digital technologies lagged somewhat behind in Production Data Management. Technologies that could bring significant benefits. While these technologies and methodologies are often perceived as difficult and expensive, quite the opposite is true: a wealth of open-source tooling is available for free, maintained by millions of developers, powering the most used digital platforms today. All for us to freely reuse for our own applications and needs! Here is where our Metis story begins.
With Metis, we combined the best of these digital open-source products and combined them in one integrated solution to tackle the challenges faced in the modern energy industry. This enables our customers to transform their business needs into digital solutions with ease and speed. We offer a whole ranges of templates to start with. Anything from well to invoice is covered: from Scada interface all the way to our invoicing module: everything that you need to successfully manage your operations is available .
We believe flexibility and (data)intelligence will become the most important success factors for successfully managing energy, where the focus will shift from recording what has happened, through predicting what will happen to actually being able to MAKE it happen. In order to do so, we’d need a significant boost in adopting new, proven technologies in an economical climate that does not allow for deep and long investments. Basically: It needs to be better, faster and cheaper. The current way of working, combined with the solutions available in the market today will proof difficult to live up to this claim. And in order to get fundamental improvements, fundamental changes are needed; we don’t think that it is possible anymore to get these big gains by squeezing the margins out of current solutions.
We went back to the drawing board and have combined our decades of deep industry knowledge with the power of the world’s most used and robust technologies. We stand on the shoulders of giants and use their hard work in infrastructure, security, performance and functionality. Here we have incorporated our logic and built Metis. We have created a digital platform that allows for rapid realisation of digital solutions. With implementation speed, flexibility and performance that is unparalleled.
Please continue to read to see how it all works.
How Metis works
User Interface
Metis runs as a web application and its front end is built with Django and Javascript. Uber, Dropbox, Spotify and also Instagram: all built with Django. By incorporating web development best practices, new functionality is easy to add and fully customisable to your requirements: Metis can follow corporate branding and be fully integrated in intranets or portals. Works on all devices. Everything is role-based and users are guided through their processes by visual helpers and wizards, with an Excel like navigation for those occurrences manual data manipulation is needed.
Infrastructure
Metis offers a lot of options and flavours; Metis can be run on-premise, in a hybrid cloud setup or fully in the cloud. Our customers can choose freely if they want to use our hosting with AWS or use their own. The beauty is: Metis works everywhere, anytime. AWS, Google Cloud Services or Azure, Windows, MacOS, Linux, Oracle, MsSQL, Postgres, MySQL or noSQL… All platforms, databases and technologies are supported. Even better, in-memory databases and message brokers are part of the standard setup; allowing to fully integrate with any web server, email server or API. Or SCADA Metering system. Or pricing system. Etc. Just like any other application can connect with Metis through its powerful REST API. A setup run by companies like JP Morgan Chase or Robinhood. If you’d like your data in pictures that’s fine too: reporting and visualisation are fully included and full integration with tools like PowerBI, Tableau, SSRS, etc is readily available.
Data, Processing and Automation
Metis’ core is in Python, a general-purpose coding language, meaning that Python can be used to build anything you can think of. That’s why it is probably being used by over 8 million developers, ranging from attic heroes to organisations like NASA. Python reigns supreme in the fields of data science and machine learning / artificial intelligence, as it is fast, easy to pick up and very scalable. The scientific libraries we use allow for easy realisation of solutions with hefty calculations behind them like decline curves, predictive forecasting or Capex ROI calculations. So whether it’s regression modelling or node distribution (allocations), with Metis’ connectivity and system agnostic interface we are able to pull all your data and processes in, chaining them and automating the whole process. Manually loading spreadsheets should be a thing of the past.
Quality, Security, Auditability and Control
All data in Metis is auditable: everything is time-stamped for every mutation with full history who changed what. Metis integrates with all major security and authentication protocols, allowing for secure access and single sign on. Along with our algorithms for checking incoming data and high level of automation, we see the quality of data in our platform increasing. Errors and warnings in the system are logged and fed back to GSES automatically. On top of that we offer integrated six sigma modelling on all our processes, allowing to clearly see break downs of process steps with actual times and interesting events recorded against them.
Success, Support and Pricing
The quality, experience and skillset of the people are an integral part of the success and cost management on any project. The track-record of GSES speaks for itself. Our Metis platform is rock solid and doesn’t need a lot of looking after once it runs. We utilise automated testing, continuous integration and deployments and actively give back and share with the open-source community. After all, they allowed for our licensing model to be the most competitive in the market: low implementation costs and low monthly fees.
Please contact us if you would like to discover more about our Services offering or Metis.
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