How to Build Requirements for Flexibility, Not Friction.
From Problem to Platform: How Energy Leaders Choose Software That Actually Delivers
The third in a four-part guide for energy leaders navigating the full buyer journey.
So, you’ve identified the problem and explored your options. Now comes the stage that shapes everything: writing the requirements.
This is where many energy companies unintentionally sabotage their future. The safe instinct is to mirror the current system. List what it does, document the workarounds, and bake them into the new RFP.
The problem? If your current setup relies on emailing spreadsheets to reconcile volumes or raising IT tickets for every allocation change, you’ve just locked yourself into the same bottlenecks for another decade.
The Trap of the Status Quo.
- Static asset portfolios.
- Predictable reporting cycles.
- Minimal pressure for agility.
- Assets come online or offline overnight.
- Deferred production can skew allocations mid-month.
- New contracts require rapid changes to equity splits and back-allocation logic.
- Regulators expect faster, more transparent reporting with zero tolerance for errors.
If your requirements are built for yesterday’s world, they will fail tomorrow.
Writing for What’s Possible.
- Instant allocation logic updates: No vendor dependency, no waiting weeks for development.
- Self-service reporting: Users access validated data directly, without reworking in Excel.
- Rapid onboarding: New facilities or contracts live in days, not months.
- Elastic scalability: Expand capacity without downtime or costly rebuilds.
From Months to Minutes.
A North Sea operator moved from a legacy system where changes took 6–12 months to a setup where in-house teams can reconfigure allocation logic the same day. Another cut asset onboarding time from years to months, without a single line of custom code.
These are the outcomes you enable when you write requirements for agility, not constraint.
In Supplier Selection, we’ll look at the questions that separate vendors who talk about flexibility from those who deliver it in practice.
