D i s p at c h i n g & C o m m u n i c at i o n s
Roadnet Technologies provided
"Roadnet," which has cut out the ticket pull,
printing, bursting, filing, sorting and routing.
Now all that is needed is one sheet of stepby-step directions for the entire day's routes.
Additionally, the company's MobileCast
allows Wilson to see their drivers' routes and
progress in real time all day long.
Cargas' Solution Bulider allows the
data to move between the technologies
into a seamless platform. Cargas uses a
Web-based application for office users and
a mobile application for the fuel delivery
drivers. Built-in connections and interfaces to the trucks' digital meter registers
ensure each truck can accurately capture
fuel delivery, real time price changes and
prevent over filling. An on-truck billing feature eliminates the time and cost of sending
delivery invoices through the mail.
"When you're looking at automation,
you're looking at integrating four platforms:
wireless delivery, electronics, routing and
logistics, and back office," said Gary Sippin,
owner of Sippin Energy, a fuel oil company
based in Monroe, Conn.
"This orchestra of technology is amazing," he said. "Putting these together, or
connecting the orchestra, has good consequences with a windfall of benefits."
Sippin said they used a combination of
systems, routing from Roadnet Technologies
and wireless delivery from Automated
Wireless Environments, to implement a
driver incentive program.
"We used wireless delivery along with
routing metrics to start a compensationbased efficiency program," he said, which
was an unintended outcome of that pairing
of technologies that worked out very well for
his company.
"Our customer service representatives
have everything at their fingertips when a
customer calls," said Wilson's O'Connell.
"We can now give them a very accurate time
window of when their delivery will arrive.
At this point, we could double our business
without the need for more administrative
personnel."
Another company seeing these back
office benefits is Kauffman Gas, a six-truck,
propane-only distributor, headquartered in
Atglen, Pa. and led by father and son team
Ken and Chris Kauffman.
"We made a quick decision to go
paperless," said Chris, then went on to
describe the manual process they used to
employ, which involved using postcards
as tickets, sorting them out by hand and
then running ADD Systems' Energy E3.
Chris saw that the system was tedious and
needed an upgrade.
"So I said to my dad, let's skip that (manual) step," he said. They did a test run using
the paperless Raven delivery and dispatch
system. When they saw that Raven made the
www.fueloilnews.com | FUEL OIL NEWS | June 2013
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