National Petroleum News (NPN) has been the independent voice of the petroleum industry since 1909 as the opposition to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. So, motor fuels marketing and retail is not just a sideline for us, it’s our core competency.
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/29053
MARKETING & SUPPLY BY LAURAGLASS, MARKWARD, SR. AND KEITHREID Not keeping a close eye on product could run up big costs TOOLS FOR FUEL MANAGEMENT “T FuelQuest provides customers a complete platform to manage their fuel operations HE CONCEPT OF THE PHYSICAL supply chain hasn’t changed in 100 years,” observed Houston- based petroleum industry con- sultant Gary Bevers, president of Bevers & Co. “But what’s become more difficult to manage is the paper trail of distribution.” suppliers every day from a “best buy” perspective or the early detection of theft. It also adds efficiency and accuracy to the accounting requirements. “These types of tools were developed out of necessity with a focus on efficiency,” said Dan Warren,SMARTLogix’s vice president of marketing and product development. SMARTLogix, headquartered in Ft.Mill, S.C., offers a suite of real-time petroleum management solutions that includes inven- tory replenishment, dispatch optimization, GPS forensic resource tracking, and bill of lading to delivery reconciliation. The sys- tem can be integrated with most back-office applications. SMARTruck digitally captures transactions to verify loads, deliveries, pump-outs, flushes, transfers and corre- sponding GPS events so that users can opti- mize loads and routes, centralize dispatch- ing, and manage driver activity. “We started in the business with tank monitoring we came out with a wireless tank monitor and the be-all end-all goal of that Moreover, rising fuel prices also make it costly not to keep close tabs on product.“Compared to the old days when fuel storage didn’t cost as much,” Bevers explained, “your price risk today makes inventory management and near-time delivery vital. Because the market is so volatile, electronic tank monitoring is crucial in order to make money. The distribution and price of fuel are a lot more com- plex. So buying at the right time is a critical need.” Automation does not eliminate human interac- tion, but merely automates some of the more rou- tine and in some cases more complex processes and calculations allowing the human component to concentrate on more strategic issues. In general, these solutions enable best practices—whatever those might be for specific operations—including just-in-time delivery; choosing among multiple 12 APRIL 2011 was to tell us when the tank was at the lowest point so that you could drop the amount of gallons in the fewest amount of stops,” he said. “And if you can do that, technically you might be able to do twice as many deliveries per day. And that naturally pro- gressed to dispatching software where you can do forecasting even without a tank monitor.” Automation also helps reduce some of the com- mon issues with manual data entry among multiple sources of interaction.“Manual processes are prone to error,” said Glenn Turner, president of FireStream World Wide. “If you are doing things on index cards and spreadsheets and chalkboards and whatnot, it’s probably not going to be long before you run one of your locations or one of your cus- tomer’s locations out of product,which is ultimate- ly what we’re trying to prevent here.” NPN Magazine www.npnweb.com