UCON 2010 Breakout Sessions Sneek Peek

As part of our preparations for this years Synthesis User Conference, we’ve been blogging some details of what we are planning. Today I’d like to give you a preview of some of the breakout sessions we are putting together. We’d love to hear your ideas for things to include. Please post in the comments below, or email us directly.

As in previous years, the breakout sessions will fall into either a business track, or a technical track. Unlike past years, however, we will present most of them twice so that attendee’s will be able to participate in most, if not all, sessions.

Business Track Session

Best Practices in Order to Scheduling (O2S)

This session is focused on how best to collaborate with customers and optimize operations when receiving and scheduling orders (nominations and requests). We’ll share the most recent upgrades to Nomination, as well as Synthesis’ rich scheduling capabilities.  We’ll also cover what we have seen as best practices in the industry; techniques for better customer service, maximized revenue, and optimized plans.

Best Practices in Measurement to Booking (M2B)

This session follows on where the the one above finishes. It takes over the process with the schedule and covers capabilities and best practices for executing operations including integrating with SCADA and your field systems, monitoring progress and making adjustments. We’ll discuss ways to get traceability via ID schemes tying noms all the way to inventory and charges. What is the best way to handle multiple measurement sources, including Synthesis Remote? What are their ways to automate and streamline ticket distribution, book to physical and other stock accounting functions. Make sure you know all about the sizable list of new capabilities at your disposal in Synthesis.

Workshop on Future Features

What should Entessa include in Release 10, 11 and beyond? What does the Synthesis road-map look like. This session is your opportunity to find out what our plans are. More importantly its your opportunity to help shape them. It will be in a workshop format where we’ll facilitate the flow of ideas. Your participation in this session this will play a huge role in what we do to our product over the next 12 months.

Using Synthesis Internationally

Synthesis has many built in capabilities that allow it to be deployed and used in a variety of different countries. In this session we’ll show you how to take advantage of many of these options. It will include how to support multiple languages, dates, currencies, and units of measurement. We’ll also have an informative case study on the Oil logistics business in Canada. Finally, we’ll cover how to roll out your enterprise solutions across borders.

Measuring Success in Marine Ops

This topic focuses on marine operations, but is a good case study for all parts of the supply chain. We discuss how rich, real time operational data can be used to tune your operations, improving turn around, reducing demurrage and generally getting more out of your marine assets. We’ll profile best practices in the industry and illustrate how to use Synthesis to help.

What’s the “Business” in B2B?

Increasingly carriers and operators are communicating with their customers and vendors electronically, in real time. This session will cover how you can use standard Synthesis capabilities to integrate with your partners, either a) via data exchanges such as DTN (Petroex, TABS) and Transport4 (PIDX), or b) directly using Synthesis and industry standards.  Learn about current industry trends (who is doing what), the costs and revenue opportunities, benefits and pitfalls, and the best ways to take advantage of a tighter relationship with your customers and partners.

Business Controls (catchier name coming!)

From SOX to prior period adjustments, from compliance to business intelligence, knowing exactly what is going on, and detecting when changes occur is a key to success. Based on a request from last year, we’ll review how Synthesis can help monitor, control and manage your business.

Technical Track Session Suggestions

Report Writing & the Synthesis Database

This session is in part an update from a well received session we did 2 years ago. It’s an in-depth tutorial on the latest capabilities of the Synthesis reporting engine, with an emphasis on how to write your own XLS, Word, PDF and Crystal Reports. Its also a insiders guide on the details of the Synthesis database schema.

Building Apps using the Synthesis Platform

The Synthesis Platform many features for building web based and distributed applications. Whether you are developing in house apps, looking to add extensions to Synthesis “Petro”, or integrate with other technology, this session will benefit you. We’ll review in detail the architecture and capabilities of Synthesis Platform (Community Edition). We’ll share tutorials and working examples of common web application requirements, including building CRUD pages, MDA/code-gen, our or your own Web Service API’s, configuring extensions, deployment and more.

Wow, how did you do that (“Cool Interactive Demo”)?

We have plans for an interesting, participatory, Synthesis based visioning demo built specifically for the UCON. In this session we’ll show you how it was easier than it looked, using the Synthesis Platform and combining our “petro” with 3rd party API’s.

25 ways to Configure & Extend Synthesis “Petro”

A fun and informative session where 2 presenters, alternating in 2 minutes slots, will present 25 powerful techniques for making Synthesis work better for your company. A valuable how-to list including Setting up Alerts, Using our new Rules Engine, customizing your field names, configuring decimal places, ordering drop-down lists, triggering events, and much more.

Synthesis Remote Under the Hood

Release 9 includes Synthesis Remote, a Rich Internet Application (RIA) that allows field users to enter ticket and meter provings while offline and then sync with Synthesis when they get back home or to the office. In this session we’ll detail how it works and how you might be able to use the same approaches for your adapters, extensions and applications.

Entessa Test Driven Development & Continuous Integration

A “this is how we do it” walk though Entessa’s development processes, tools, environments and methodologies. Part of the session will focus on Product Development, and part on Delivery and our Professional Services. We’ll share our test driven approach and our use of continuous integration and automated promotion process. Take away time saving and quality improving tips that you can apply to your own development and testing. We’ll touch on CI, integrating open source tools like NANT and NUnit with Visual Studio, what we do with Syn-forge, options for Cloud hosting, virtualization and a whole lot more.

This is most of what we are working on (we do have some surprises up our sleeves too), but its not too late to send us your suggestions. Just add a comment below or email us directly. In the upcoming weeks we’ll blog more details about the UCON.

See you in June!