Greater transparency, auditability and compliance are the new mantras of business and government today. Faced with higher risk exposure -- while at the same time coping with the mandates of regulatory scrutiny and accountability -- today's energy buyers are looking for ways to better manage, track and audit the complex business processes associated with purchasing energy in today's volatile, constantly changing market. Organizations everywhere are demanding much higher degrees of transparency and compliance. The World Energy Exchange is helping them to achieve it.

Detailed Step-By-Step Process Ensures Total Compliance with the Most Exacting Standards
World Energy has a documented step-by-step process for ensuring that every auction runs smoothly and is protest-free. In fact, thousands of energy supply bids have been awarded using the auction without a single protest ever being lodged. The process includes data scrubbing and formatting, rigorous analysis to establish market benchmarks, multiple auction events to enable testing of various term and price combinations, contract negotiation and enrollment support.

Meeting SOX Mandates
Not only are these built in processes helping hundreds of government agencies to ensure fair and open competition, but they are also enabling public companies to comply with Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) and other regulatory mandates. The Exchange was designed to ensure competition among the highest possible number of suppliers, along with openness and transparency in the timely disclosure of prices, supply, demand and market transactions. It was also architected to eliminate the potential for price manipulation.

Built-in, Self-Documenting Audit Trail
Key to compliance is the ability to document, test and audit internal controls over financial reporting and material weaknesses. The software and business processes inherent in the Exchange provide self-documenting due diligence that meets the most stringent guidelines. Included as part of every transaction are date and time stamping of bids, comparison of each bid with utility standard offer rates, as well as automated stop times. These features ensure the integrity of auction events and create audit trails and a self-documenting capability essential to SOX Section 404 compliance.

End-to-End Portfolio Management -- at no Extra Cost
Also embedded as part of the Exchange is an end-to-end portfolio management system that gives energy buyers a real-time data warehousing and database management solution for storing and tracking monthly usage information, analyzing contract and facility performance and providing the functionality needed to truly automate the processes of energy purchasing, contracting and consumption. In effect, organizations using the World Energy Exchange have the added benefit of an entire back office energy portfolio management system to track everything they need to know about their energy contracts and usage - and at no extra cost.