Mercatus: Investment Lifecycle Management Solution for Energy Sector

Haresh Patel, CEO & Co-founder

The energy investment lifecycle consists of multiple phases, beginning with origination, business development, engineering and construction, operations and maintenance, and asset management; with finance at the centre. This lifecycle represents a workflow within and across each of these functions. Mercatus has delivered a single cloud-based solution, Energy Investment Lifecycle Management for integrating this workflow that replaces several point solutions and integrates with other legacy systems. For example, some use Salesforce for the origination process, Oracle Primavera and HP for project management. These legacy systems can be replaced by or integrated with Mercatus, which serves as the single system of record for the entire process.

Mercatus’ Energy Investment Lifecycle Management (ILM) platform comprises of Pipeline Management and Asset Management solutions, built around the company’s cloud-based data repository. Pipeline Management manages the energy project pipeline from idea proposal to commercial operation date. It includes notifications, proposal generation, pipeline consolidation and filtering, project detail management, and milestone tracking to help automate the processes from project development to construction. Dashboard and analytics summarize all these into a sleek user-interface. Similar features in project engineering workflow assist engineers in resource management across different projects.

The asset management systems come into play in the final operational phase. Seamlessly integrated with the end-to-end ILM system, configurable dashboards and an asset registry system provide a snapshot view of portfolio and asset data, allowing asset managers to analyze a project’s progress.

Mercatus facilitates a collaborative workflow platform that connects every phase of an energy asset’s investment lifecycle, from origination through end-of-life

Finally, automated reporting features make it simple to share information bi-directionally across all departments, keeping key stakeholders informed and analyze key areas for improvement.

Insight, speed, and visibility are the three key benefits that distinguish Mercatus’ ILM solution. It delivers actionable and shareable insights for customers through dashboards and analytics, enhances production speed through collaborative end-to-end workflows, and improves data visibility by integrating all information in one place. Furthermore, by using a single system, finance, development, construction, and asset management teams get to eliminate the hassle of using disconnected systems and the data silos that come with them.

GE Solar, operated by General Electric’s renewable subsidiary, Current, powered by GE, is one of Mercatus’ longest standing customers. In the early stages, their solar development team was spending excess time generating proposals across multiple systems and struggled to handle the influx of projects with their current workforce; thus losing time to market. Seeking a solution specific to their business, GE Solar turned to Mercatus to help them scale efficiently. Mercatus Energy ILM was able to reduce the number of IT systems by half, decrease the time they spent generating proposals. By centralizing all of their data, Mercatus helped GE Solar gain clarity over the risk factors of each investment, allowing them to make more informed investment decisions. As a result, GE was able to grow their business by growing their project pipeline quindecuple/15x without adding headcount.

Combining best-in-class software and in-depth industry knowledge and expertise, Mercatus boasts of a connected enterprise system with a centralized data repository, automated workflow, and analytic dashboards. The company is also working on an offline, native mobile enterprise application, which will allow on-site teams to utilize the platform in real-time. In addition, the vision to leverage AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning for optimizing asset forecasting and operations pinpoints a fundamental locus on their roadmap. “Once these new capabilities are in place, Mercatus will expand into an interactive enterprise facilitating a collaborative ecosystem for energy trading and an asset marketplace where assets can be sold to different entities,” envisions Haresh Patel, CEO and Co-founder of Mercatus.