data gathering and dispatching methods. With constant changes in pricing, the ability to determine your true average cost at any point in time is crucial. The last thing you want to do is buy at a high price, have it decline, and have your weighted average cost dramatically increased.”
COSTS & CONVERSION For all of the advantages, many operations have yet to get on board with automating their fuel logistics. However, fuel price volatility and extreme prices, along with growing com- petitive pressures, have promoted a spike in interest in the past few years among operations of all sizes. From a cost per- spective, solutions can be found to suit any level of retailer or marketer in the industry. Some solutions promise the small- er operator the same capabilities of the larger operator in reliability and reduced costs. “From a financial perspective and from a technical per-
spective, this is not really that huge of a change,” said FireStream’s Turner. “At retail sites almost everybody has electronic tank gauges. And those electronic tank gauges in most cases are accessible remotely and you can get data from
these gauges relatively easily and inexpensively. If you or one of your customers happens to not be connected to the Internet at a site, that’s obviously a minor investment of broadband connectivity, which is pretty available through- out most of the country for less than $50 per month. If you happen to have an older tank gauge that does not have a card in it that allows you to connect your wireless area network, there is frequently an ability to upgrade for what is not a substantial one-time investment to the efficiency and even increased profit margins that the larger players enjoy.” In some cases the biggest issue against adoption might be
cultural or institutional. “The role that handles (the fuel logistics process) varies dramatically from organization to organization,” said Turner. “In some organizations the level of sophistication might be pretty significant. In a lot of organizations, quite frankly, that is not the case and the peo- ple might be averse to change by nature especially if they are good at what they do manually. They tend to be suspicious that the technology cannot do it as well as they can.As is the case with any significant change, you have to be willing to change people as well as the way you do things.”
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