A real-time terminal inventory platform for Shell's trading and scheduling teams. ORION replaced fragmented, manually assembled Supply updates with a live Databricks-fed view of customer positions, movements, and constraints — refreshed every 15 minutes.
Traders and schedulers at Shell depended on the Supply team for inventory and constraint updates. Every time a trader needed to know whether a customer had enough LNG to fulfil an upcoming deal, they had to contact Supply, wait for a response, and work from information that was already out of date by the time it arrived.
This created a cascade of problems: slower decision-making, increased operational risk, and key insights — movements, constraints, available-to-sell positions — scattered across systems and communications channels with no single source of truth.
Before — traders emailing Supply for position data, waiting hours for responses already stale on arrival
Provide a single source of truth that accelerates decisions, reduces risk, and improves utilisation by surfacing current and forecast inventory, movements, constraints, and available-to-sell (ATS) positions in one place — in near real-time.
ORION aggregates operational terminal data from Databricks and presents it as a set of intuitive dashboard views. A trader opening ORION can instantly see:
Customer Inventory View — live bbl volumes ranked by customer, with ATS positions refreshed every 15 minutes
A trader needs to confirm whether Customer A at Carson Terminal has enough LNG to fulfil an upcoming deal. Instead of contacting Supply, the trader opens ORION, reviews current inventory, checks expected inflows and outflows, and confirms whether the customer is at risk of breaching min/max storage limits — in under two minutes, without a single email sent.
Customer drill-down — contracted vs. actual, min/max constraints, and upcoming movement impact in one view
The MVP comprises five interconnected views, each answering a distinct question a trader or planner faces during their day:
Forecast & Constraints View — 30-day inventory trend with projected breach alerts and nomination pipeline
Capacity & Utilisation View — total capacity vs. fill, free ullage, and per-tank status across the terminal
Movements View — vessel ETAs, truck and pipeline flows, and customer-level delta in real time
Databricks serves as the single source of truth for all inventory data, with a 15-minute refresh rate across all views. The MVP visibility model gives all users access to all customer volumes, with a more granular RBAC model planned for future phases.
ORION gives Shell's trading and scheduling teams a fundamentally faster and safer way to work. By removing the dependency on manual Supply updates and replacing it with a live, accurate dashboard, the platform frees traders to focus on making decisions rather than chasing data. Success will be measured by fewer Supply requests, faster decision cycles, improved ATS accuracy, and fewer last-minute operational escalations.
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