Musket Corporation is part of the Love’s Family of Companies and specializes in commodity supply, trading and logistics around the globe. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, with offices in Oklahoma City, Geneva and Calgary, Musket provides expertise on both a marketing and operational level for its customers.

Musket handles billions of gallons of crude oil, NGL, natural gas, petroleum products, renewable fuels and DEF every year and continues to grow. Thanks to a high-energy environment and an ambitious mindset, Musket aims to continue gaining market share, developing new business lines, and providing both new and current customers with top-quality service.

Zema Enterprise gives Musket Corp. the tools to trade smarter and move faster

Summary: 

Facing rising complexity in fuel pricing and data integration, Musket Corp. needed a faster, more reliable pricing platform. By switching to
Zema Enterprise, it streamlined data ingestion, improved accuracy and reduced internal workload — ensuring critical pricing flows seamlessly into
its trading, risk and analytics systems. The result: stronger performance, sharper decisions and a future-proof foundation that keeps Musket and its
customers running at full speed.

Trading and supply to keep America’s motorists moving

Love’s 645 Travel Stops and Country Stores are a familiar sight across the U.S. Professional truck drivers and motorists rely on it for 24- hour access to gasoline, diesel fuel and compressed natural gas (CNG), as well as biodiesel, renewable natural gas (RNG) and diesel exhaust fluid (DEF).

In turn, Love’s relies on the ability of its subsidiary, Musket Corp., to procure, process, sell and trade fuels and energy at volume to ensure its pumps are ‘wet’ and its prices competitive. Musket also has a number of contracts with third parties, leveraging its position and arbitrage opportunities to firms that need gas, diesel and other fuel energy options. In volatile markets, where the fuel mix continues to evolve, Musket is hyper-focused on managing prices and volumes so it can remain a reliable partner for all its customers. 

Pricing, volumes and scalability in an evolving market

Pricing information is the lifeblood of Musket’s trade and supply operations. Its trading desks ingest data from over 20 price services, including OPIS, Platts, Argus, DTN and more. Those prices are fundamental to Musket’s trade and supply desk, and inform the work of its credit, risk and accounting departments.

Jeph McAlester, Director of Business Systems at Musket Corp., lists the ways in which his colleagues depend on accurate, timely and consistent pricing data: “Trading, valuation of trades, supply and marketing, business development, PnL and Risk reporting, accounting, tax and credit functions — I could go on. Across the board, pricing is very important to us.”

Musket is also a heavy user of analytics and, more recently, AI to support its business. As McAlester says: “When you look around, you can already see how much AI is being integrated within different business strategies. Both artificial and human intelligence need the best information to make the best decisions. If we don’t have consistent delivery of pricing and volume, it impacts us in a big way.”

Unfortunately, Musket’s existing pricing platform had been declining in functionality over a number of years and was struggling to reliably import data into its ETRM and other systems from all the price services that Musket wanted to use.

“The time had come,” says McAlester. “The support was no longer reliable, and we weren’t sure that the necessary continuous investment was being made into the platform. The pricing environment continues to evolve. There’s always something new going on. We needed a system with longevity that we could trust to stay ahead of the game.”

Key functionality and a relentless customer focus

McAlester and his team at Musket undertook an extensive review of the options available to them, and eventually selected Zema Enterprise to replace its existing system, based on three essential factors: functionality, scalability and the level of support on offer. “We could see early on that Zema Enterprise was rising to the top of our list,” says McAlester, “And as we continued to do more analysis, it became very clear that it was the superior solution.”

In particular, Musket was impressed by Zema Enterprise’s ability to quickly acquire and transform new pricing data from different providers and deliver additional market content faster than other solutions. “Our trading and commercial desks often want additional market or pricing content, and we found that Zema Enterprise could deliver faster for us. That’s the kind of scalability we were looking for and was one of the key reasons we selected Zema Enterprise,” says McAlester.

Zema Enterprise also supports data acquisition via a multitude of technologies — including APIs, flat files and OCR. “It provides tooling for the varying technologies each of our data partners or counterparties offer,” says McAlester. “It’s like a tool belt that can extract data, whatever format it’s in, and then deliver that efficiently. There is a lot of value there.”

In addition, Musket was impressed that Zema Global focused exclusively on pricing and had the team size and quality to build the initial solution and then to continue enhancing it over time while providing ongoing support. “The Zema Global business model impressed us,” says McAlester. “It really is centered on the customer. From developers and architects all the way up to senior management, it felt as if everyone was fighting for our success.”

Smooth implementation with seamless support

Having selected Zema Enterprise, Musket went through rigorous testing to make sure of its decision. “We can’t get this wrong. We’re talking about settlement and PnL and Risk exposure reporting. It has to be 100% accurate,” says McAlester, who also consulted with peers and colleagues in the wider oil and gas industry who were already using Enterprise and confirmed that working with Zema Global would be the right choice.

In the end, it took just under four months to fully implement the solution — on time and on budget. The process involved three main strands. The first was to migrate like-for-like functionality from the previous platform to Zema Enterprise, ensuring seamless integration of data feeds with its RightAngle ETRM system. “Converting from one platform to the new platform and not having issues with any of the key business functions was a big win for us,” says McAlester.

The second was to integrate Zema for Excel to replace Musket’s old worksheets with the automated add-in, which would streamline daily manual efforts and minimize the risk of errors.

The third, critical, element was adding automated data persistence into its data warehouse, which includes enhancing historical data analysis capability and developing advanced analytical models that serve its commercial teams.

Zema Global support and monitoring ensured a frictionless experience with data integration and then ensured a smooth transition from the project team to the operational and customer success teams.

“Of course, there were challenges as we got deeper into the product and the migration of functionality. But the Zema Global project team and even the leadership team got together and figured out a solution,” says McAlester. “The whole team truly cares about the customer. Working with Zema Global people has been a fantastic experience.”

Immediate value with more to come

McAlester points out that it is still relatively early in Musket’s relationship with Zema Global to quantify the value with formal ROI figures, but happily points out that working with Zema Global has already delivered substantial and notable benefits. For example, Zema Global has saved Musket’s internal labor time by building out new data interfaces quickly, a task that normally takes longer when carried out in-house.

“Essentially, whatever type of content we want to import, the Zema Global team can quickly do that. They acquire the data, they transform the data, they deliver the data, and then they monitor and alert on successful delivery across all data providers. And they do that consistently,” says McAlester. “Having a partner like that allows us to say we don’t need to build out a large data engineering team to manage each of these different interfaces with all these price providers. We can instead just ask Zema Global — and they do it.”

Musket also expects integration with its Snowflake feeds to deliver even more benefits, as analysts and commercial teams use historical data to enhance trading decisions. The initial response from users has been positive, and McAlester expects even more feedback on the ROI from the integration.

“We get all the value from Zema Global: the ability to scale efficiently, better support and more monitoring and alerting on prices,” he concludes. “But it’s what goes on behind the scenes that gives us real confidence. There’s a quality team that’s always researching and trying to figure out how to improve and make sure that there’s a frictionless experience getting data into our systems. And that means we can remain an essential resource for the rest of the company and its customers.”

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