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case study: Buckeye Partners

  • Enhanced existing billing and invoicing
  • Resolved scalability issues with existing system
  • On time and on budget
  • 4 months

The Setting

Buckeye Partners is a national refined petroleum pipeline system, owning over 5,350 miles of pipeline and 47 terminals. The company also provides millions of gallons of storage capacity.

The Challenge

Buckeye Partners needed to enhance its billing and invoicing system to handle dynamic pricing structures that varied by customer. The existing billing system needed to scale effectively to handle an increase in customers and pipeline activity to provide timely, accurate billing.

The Solution

As this application required new features to support more dynamic billing, e-brilliance deployed an improved application architecture that leveraged Microsoft Enterprise Library Application Blocks and our own optimized data access methods to improve scalability.

Our project team also greatly improved application response time and enhanced overall data integrity. The application was delivered on time and on budget and continues to be maintained and enhanced by e-brilliance.

Project Highlights

  • Upgraded application from base ADO.NET database calls to the Microsoft Enterprise Library Application Blocks
  • Refactored existing code to make it more efficient and allow it to scale with the addition of new customers and pipeline terminals
  • Implemented a data driven pricing calculation and validation methodology
  • Forensically reviewed existing code in order to optimize and improve performance
  • Implemented configuration management routines to greatly simplify migration from development, QA, and production environments
  • Implemented logging using the Nlog API to reduce the time and complexity to aid production support teams
  • Thoroughly documented installation and maintenance procedures to allow internal staff to better manage system

Key Benefits

Buckeye now has a more agile, flexible customer billing and invoicing system that can handle new and changing pricing promotions and services. The system is producing more complex, accurate invoices in less time on existing hardware. The Buckeye support team is better able to deploy and maintain the system. Finally, this scalable development and deployment framework allows the system to be enhanced or extended in the future with ease.