Fuel Oil News

Fuel Oil News June 2013

The home heating oil industry has a long and proud history, and Fuel Oil News has been there supporting it since 1935. It is an industry that has faced many challenges during that time. In its 77th year, Fuel Oil News is doing more than just holding

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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 35

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