Conexus Baltic Grid

• Paper-based documentation processes reduced agility and slowed business development
• Physical document stores caused delays in retrieving key information
• Increasing volatility created huge demand for gas storage
• Off-site physical document storage increased the risk of losing records

Established in 2016, Conexus Baltic Grid AS stores and supplies natural gas to customers located throughout Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Lithuania. With enough underground storage capacity to hold two times Latvia’s annual gas consumption, Conexus plays a vital role in energy security across the Baltic region.

Conexus is on a mission to develop its business by serving more of its neighbors in the region. Committed to combating climate change, Conexus is also focused on transitioning to a carbon-neutral future. To achieve both objectives, it’s crucial that Conexus keeps daily operations running smoothly.

As a heavily regulated business, Conexus generates documentation with almost every activity—critical information that must be securely stored for audits, regulatory review and record-keeping. For many years, Conexus created and stored this mission-critical documentation on paper.

“Conexus was spun off from a Latvian natural gas trading company. When we became an independent company, we inherited our former parent’s paper-based processes,” explained Mārtiņš Gode, Chief Financial Officer at Conexus Baltic Grid. “For example, board members would print large binders of paper for meetings and employees would physically drive documents to storage office location over 50km away from our head office, on a regular basis.”

With documents stored across three sites, finding documentation was a time-intensive manual process—consuming significant resources when documents needed to be signed and approved by decision-makers or retrieved for audit purposes.

“Working with paper documents also increased the risk of important documentation getting lost or accidentally destroyed,” continued Gode. “What’s more, we had a lot of documents on file that were no longer needed, which took up space and increased our storage costs. We knew that moving to digital document management processes would help to improve efficiency, strengthen governance, facilitate transparency and enhance information security as the business developed, so we made digital transformation a top priority.”