Dynegy
Analyst/Developer — Mar ‘99 to Oct ‘99
I was moved to Dynegy from Enron as the first representative of Technical Star Consulting (TSC) in an effort to build a relationship and hopefully secure a contract for more consultants. When I left Dynegy six months later, TSC had four or five additional consultants engaged with Dynegy.
The little application I built for Dynegy was quite slick. The energy traders spent a lot of time getting trade orders off the fax, signing them, and then refaxing. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if the traders didn’t have to perform this time consuming task over and over, dozens of times a day?
Upon arrival to Dynegy I was tasked to find a multi-user fax product that met their somewhat robust requirements, which included scalability for use by hundreds of people, routing incoming faxes to email boxes based on the DID (direct inward dial) fax number used, certain printing capabilities, etc, etc.
The interesting thing was that Dynegy had alread paid over $50,000 for VSI Fax, but were told by the guy there before me that it would not work. I suggested to my client that he give me a couple of days to look under the hood of VSI Fax to be sure it wouldn’t work. I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work so he reluctantly agreed but he’d obviously already had his belly full of VSI Fax and clearly didn’t really want any more bad news relating to his erroneous purchase decision.
After a couple of days of tinkering with the product I was able to demonstrate that VSI Fax would meet all of Dynegy’s requirements, thus saving the client the time and money needed to evaluate, test, and purchase another product– about $100,000!
What I did for the confirmation application was scan in all the traders’ hand-written signatures and stored them in a database. Whenever a trade confirmation was created, I looked in the database record for that trader and loaded the small graphics file of his or her signature. All the trader had to do was click a button to confirm the trade and the signed trade confirmation was faxed automatically. Secure electronic digital signatures were used to ensure that no one could confirm a fax for another trader.
When a confirmation was incoming, I could analyze the fax number of the recipient and determine a corresponding email address and route the confirmation to the appropriate traders inbox.
Here is what I did:
- Large-scale customization and implementation of VSI Fax into several mission critical trade confirmation and trade invoice applications
- Integrate the VSI Fax software and multi-line fax product into Dynegy’s corporate server infrastructure
- Support the confirmation and invoice application roll-out to the trading group using desk-side coaching techniques
- Y2K analysis on assigned database aplications (Heh, what a joke Y2K turned out to be!)
